New year, new server! PainScience.com offline a bit

• Jan 3, 2024 • by Paul Ingraham
Get posts in your inbox:

Weekly nuggets of pain science news and insight, usually 100-300 words, with the occasional longer post. The blog is the “director’s commentary” on the core content of PainScience.com: a library of major articles and books about common painful problems and popular treatments. See the blog archives or updates for the whole site.

PainScience.com will be moving to a new server on Thursday morning (January 4). Although it will probably go fine, it’s a bit nerve-wracking, because it could also be a bit of a shit-show. For a small e-bookstore, this is the virtual equivalent of moving the inventory to a new space — just not as sweaty. Unless you count sweating from stress.

This move is happening because I have invested in a quite a nice new server, pre-paying to lock-in a good discount for the next three years.

A “server” is, of course, just a fancy computer that I rent. It lives somewhere in America — I don’t actually know, but I should ask, maybe I can drop in and look at it someday. PainScience.com runs on that computer like a kind of app. The server’s one job is to cough up my articles and books when you ask for them — to serve them to you.

It may only have one job, but it’s a doozy. Web technology is also a bit of a house of cards these days, a thousand-layer cake of interdependencies, and poop occurs. Servers can run flawlessly for months at a time … and then fall down hard with a seemingly trivial update or flipping one wrong switch.

The fun all starts at about 9am Pacific. It might be slick and over with in a matter of minutes … or it could be down hours. Or up, down, up, and down again. Plus a chance of glitches through the weekend. You just never know.

Even if the site is offline, I will remain available at paul@painscience.com, and you can check my Facebook, Threads, or Twitter accounts for status updates.