We’re back!

By: Steven Tarbox
Date:
Last updated:
Stena Lagan dry docked at Belfast's Harland and Wolff 28/1/17. Copyright © Scott Mackey.
Stena Lagan dry docked at Belfast's Harland and Wolff 28/1/17. Copyright © Scott Mackey.

Following major technical difficulties at our web host on the evening of 05.07.18, NI Ferry Site became intermittently unavailable, then totally unavailable from around 23:30 on Thursday night.  Unfortunately, this was totally outside of our control, but thankfully all data was backed up at the host the previous morning.  Following this incident, I have put in place an additional offsite backup to be deployed at our backup host should a similar outage occur again – for most of Friday the web address pointed to this backup host in order to tell users and search engines that the website was only temporarily unavailable.

This is the first time this has ever happened at our host in 8 years, and they have assured all customers that they have put in place measures to ensure it does not happen again. However, as above I have now put in place additional backups at a different location to ensure this cannot happen again.

As a result of this issue the site was restored from the most recent backup which was taken early morning on the 5th.  This means that any updates done yesterday (including the post about the return of FRAZER MARINER to Lough Foyle to provide a two-ship service) have been deleted.  Had the outage occurred 30 minutes later no data would have been lost, but thats how it goes.

Finally I’d just like to apologise for any inconvenience this unplanned downtime caused.


Polite notice: While we welcome our articles being shared, we request that links to this website are provided rather than other approaches. Thank you (NI Ferry Site team).

Categories: Blog