Thirty hours offline: what Thursday's outage taught me
What happened
On Thursday 5 November, at around 7:55 pm (Paris time), the fibre line connecting the site to the internet was cut. racingtech.fr does not run in a big data centre: it is hosted locally, on my own server, at home. When the line goes down, the site goes down with it.
The site stayed unreachable until the night from Friday to Saturday, at around 1:53 am. Discord alerts stopped, and new prices were no longer checked. However, the collection of Leboncoin listings held up, because it runs over a separate 4G connection. It only lost three hours of graphics card checks, on Thursday evening.
The price index did not move
While the site was offline, listing collection carried on. When it came back, the price index and the listings were up to date: only three hours of checks are missing, on Thursday evening, out of a month of history. Discord alerts resumed when the site came back.
New prices, on the other hand, had to be checked again. I never show a price older than 24 hours, and everything was up to date by Saturday morning.
How the site came back
To reopen the site, I set up an emergency backup. Since the fibre is still not restored, racingtech.fr currently runs on several 4G plans. A server I rent from a hosting provider receives the visits and forwards them to my local server. That setup is why you can read this article. It works, but every plan and the rented server are paid monthly, and none of it was designed to last.
Many of you came back
As soon as the site returned, regular visitors came back to their price index pages, the deals and the new price lists. If you are one of them: thank you. It shows these benchmarks are useful, and that is why this outage matters.
What it would take
racingtech.fr is free, with no ads and no cookies. Its only income is commission from Amazon links: a few cents per visitor.
I want a line cut to stop taking the site down, without relying on monthly 4G plans. My plan is to set up a real backup: a second server installed elsewhere, at a relative's, that would take over on its own. The real cost is about €450: a used NAS at around €300, without drives, and a 1 TB SSD, at around €150 right now. I am setting a first goal of €200 to get started.
If you want to help
If the site has saved you time or money, you can help fund this backup on Ko-fi: ko-fi.com/racingtech. It is a one-off, with no commitment, and every contribution will go towards keeping the site up.
And if you can't, that's fine. Coming back, telling others about it or using my links when you buy new parts already helps a lot. We can also talk about it on Discord.