Extended dpnow outage finally fixed

For a rather unusual reason that only became apparent at about 11PM last night, dpnow.com had been inaccessible from about 3PM UK time until almost midnight. After nearly 9 hours of inaccessibility, the problem was put right.

The problem started at lunch time on Monday when our server started experiencing an unusually high visitor load, peaking at about two days worth of normal traffic per hour.

The reason behind this massive upsurge in traffic was that we'd been highlighted and linked to from the infamous IT news and community mega-site, SlashDot. We weren't that surprised when 'Error 500' messages greeted attempts to visit dpnow. We assumed the server had crashed, though it now looks like it actually survived the SlashDot onslaught.

We're still in discussion with our hosting company about exactly why our server locked everyone out for the rest of the day, but at least we're back now and hopefully the site will run smoothly again.

This is the first time we've had a server outage for longer than a few minutes in the three and a half years since dpnow first started.

So once again, we're very sorry that the site has been down for such a long time, but at least we're back in business once more!