The Incident
The incident begins
Hey everyone. On the afternoon of May 18th (Monday) something nasty happened. All my servers went offline. Honestly, I had no idea what to do, so I spent the whole day hoping it was just my provider acting up and that it would sort itself out. The weird part was that the provider's own website was down too.
Night came. The problem didn't sort itself out, and I started to get nervous.
Back then I still didn't know how bad it really was.
On the morning of May 19th the provider's site came back, but all it showed was one big notice. Here's the part that mattered:
We would like to inform you that due to an emergency situation, your server was affected by the incident. Unfortunately, the data stored on the server has been lost and cannot be recovered. We understand the seriousness of this situation and sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused.
That's when I fucking lost my shit. I had no backup servers. On top of that, the config files in my backups were badly out of date. It was a real epic fail.
I had to find new RELIABLE server providers in an urgent order. A few things mattered: hardware powerful enough with solid bandwidth, no ban on hosting adult sites, and ideally payment in crypto.
At the moment of catastrophe, I realized how big my deployment problems actually were:
- No guide laying out what to do step by step
- No scripts to quickly pull down or restore the database
- No way to run multiple sites from a single IP address
- No documentation describing what should be deployed and how
- No automated file backups beyond the posts themselves. Anything not copied by hand was gone for good.
None of this was good enough. I had to learn how to do it all properly, and fast. Big thanks to Claude Code, which had my back during a really rough stretch.
Recovery
By Tuesday evening I had my first new server and dragged the first site back from the dead. While setting it up, I wrote myself a manual covering every step. Together with Claude Code I put together a whole arsenal of scripts. Along the way I ran into a bunch of small bugs and squashed every one of them.
On Wednesday I got another server, which let me resurrect the rest of the sites. By the time the weekend rolled around I had new post uploads working again.
Unfortunately, because of the flaws in my setup, I lost a full day of data from Monday, since backups only run once a day. I also lost every user avatar, because those weren't being synced anywhere.
By the weekend I was completely wrung out. But the thing that matters is that I got everything working again.
The dark ritual
I understood that this could happen again. Something had to change, radically. So I started studying DevOps necromancy to become a proper IT warlock.
My fleet is getting a set of dedicated standby servers. The database and the server data will replicate onto them, so the standby servers always hold current data with a delay of at most a minute.
That opens up two new options for me:
- If I lose a server, I can switch over to a standby in minutes with almost no data loss.
- I can migrate a server with zero downtime whenever I need beefier hardware. You won't even notice it happened.
On top of that, I'm making my infrastructure genuinely secure. Every server will live inside a private network, a VPN (virtual private network).
This is what VPNs were actually built for, not for getting around blocks.
The private VPN network doesn't listen to or accept any traffic from the outside internet that isn't cryptographically signed. That lets me safely sync files inside the network, stream database changes from server to server, gather logs, and process files.
My whole infrastructure is moving up to a new level.
It'll take me another couple of weeks to finish the dark ritual.
This nasty incident really lit a fire under my ass. It showed me that nothing in this world is 100% reliable. To survive, you have to adapt. And what doesn't kill us makes us stronger.
Thanks for reading. I hope the next announcement is one that actually makes your day.
