Nuffnang went down due to server hard disk crash

What a surprise. Nuffnang’s website went down today due to a hard disk failure. I don’t usually check Nuffnang’s website everyday so I have no idea what time the hard disk failure occurred, but the email from Timothy Tiah came in at about 3pm. According to the email, the hard disk crashed at about 12pm today but the good news is that they had backed up all the data on the server, so there is no worry that your money in your account would be lost!


This came just a few months after (Nuffnang’s direct competitor) went down for many days due to a silly reason: they forgot to renew their domain name! How many days did went down I can’t really recall, but could be up to 1 week.

This time what could be the reason for a hard disk crash and no hard disk redundancy? Maybe Nuffnang used a single 80GB hard disk bought from Lowyat at a discounted price, and plugged it in a clone PC. Haha… 🙂

At about 12.00PM today on the 19th of February 2008, the hard disk for one of our servers crashed resulting in server downtime and some loss of data.
The good news is that our team has taken necessary precautions for uncertainties like this and have backed up whatever data we had.
We are in the midst of restoring our servers and getting them up and running again so please bear with us for these few hours where our site will be down.

It’s hard to place an exact timeline on when everything will be back to normal again but if everything goes as planned, everything should be up and running by 6.00PM today.

Until then, your blog will load just fine as normal but with all the Nuffnang ad units minimized or hidden.

What I don’t understand is why their servers do not have hard disk redundancy? In the event that one hard disk failed, there should be one or more hard disks running so that there will not be any down time at all. Something like that, although I am not exactly sure if this is possible because I am not an expert in web server and database server management. How can a hard disk crash bring Asia’s First Blog Advertising Community down for 6 hours? This is if everything goes as planned which does not happen usually.

Good luck to their technical team! I want my money in my account to stay intact! 🙂