I’ve been back from California since late Monday evening, but yesterday my host provider had a ‘hardware malfunction’ with my server, which caused some major downtime. Even after it came back up, I had some MySQL errors that prevented me from getting into Movable Type and therefore from publishing new posts here. Things looked resolved this afternoon, and then the server went down again and required a complete replacement. Though I create back ups of my site regularly, the whole incident gave me a fright — I need to come up with a more rigorous schedule and better habits for backing up what’s on my server. Too generously, I put a lot of trust into hosting providers… I suspect I’m not the only one who does this.