Heard from the Soapblox folks. :)
They saw my original diary, but apparently not the follow on. I wanted to share part of the communication with you. As I'd already figured out by later in the day, it wasn't their fault. I had no idea their servers were in DC, from the contact info on their home site, I assumed they were in Minneapolis.
I learned a number of things from this experience, not the least of which is what an Amazon cloud center is.
From Chris Dykstra, Soapblox publisher and Warecorp CEO:
This outage was not at all due to any fault of Soapblox. It was due to a storm that brought down our data center on the East Coast of the US (http://www.pcworld.com/...).
We learned of the outage at about midnight on Friday night and had two full-time folks working with Amazon support, virtually round the clock until early this morning to bring it back up.
In fact, it quite fortunate for our bloggers that there is an established support system to respond to hosting emergencies like this. The lack of such a system is what motivated me to first reach out to offer support services to the original owners of Soapblox three years ago to offer professional hosting and software support services, and what motivated me to direct Warecorp to purchase the network outright last year
We have recently made significant investments in bringing together this important national network of bloggers by appointing Tina Dupuy as EIC at Netroots this year. http://eon.businesswire.com/....
I assure you, we will continue to invest to create a unique, fact-centered community of observation and commentary, news, and video.
And as I write this, of course, the network is back up and fully functioning. Which, of course, is cause to cheer.