What a week! Who would have thought a hurricane would knock out power in Louisville for 2 weeks?

This site has been running on a G4 server at a colo facility in Louisville. I guess I made a bad mistake in opting for the cheaper no-generator-backup plan. I thought, hey, the facility is in an industrial park, their power is solid, and even if it goes off for a few hours, I can live with that.

Last Sunday afternoon, the remains of a hurricane hit Louisville with 75 mph winds, strong enough to knock out power throughout major portions of the city. It is now Wednesday, and a big chunk of the city—including my colocation facility’s industrial park— is still without power. Apparently, the teams who fix the power lines had been sent to Texas to help with the hurricane and it’s taking a while to get them back.

Yesterday the newspaper reported that it could take two weeks to restore power.

So, belatedly, I told my colo people to hook my server up to the generator. It took them a day to do that, which isn’t bad considering their support volume for DSL customers and the fact that they have to work by flashlight. When they powered up my server, it wouldn’t start.

I drove up there today with my backup machine, a 366 mhz PowerMac G3. It’s less powerful than my iPhone. But it worked. I back up the server to an internal drive on the G3 every night, so all I had to do was boot from that drive.

Back home, I opened the G4 and got it started, but the power supply fan spins intermittently. I guess it’s time to spring for a new server.

My first impulse was to buy a Mac Mini, but by the time I pay for OS X Server and an external storage system, I’ve spent well over a thousand dollars. I can get a new XServe on closeout for $1999. Decisions, decisions.

Anyway, if you’ve ever wondered how a 366 mhz server performs with WordPress, now you know.