Earlier today (December 3rd), the MacSanta web site at http://www.macsantadeals.com went down. We’re still trying to ascertain just what happened, though currently, the problem appears to be cured.

We rapidly moved the site to our dedicated server at Pair.com, and I anticipate no further issues. We changed the DNS nameservers to point to Pair, and now we’re just waiting for these changes to propagate fully. If you’re reading this, that change has happened for you and you’re accessing the Pair version of the site.

“What would possess you, you of all people, to host this with DreamHost?”, I can hear you asking. Well, MacSanta began last year as something of a last minute scramble. DreamHost makes for a great sandbox to set things up, as you can rapidly add features on (MySQL, say) without needing to wait for help. It’s free to add on like this (or at least, already paid for), while we’ll be incurring additional (minor) charges to host at Pair. And of course, it worked just fine last year. So we stuck with it. In a single word, “Whups”.

As of around 3:30 EST, the problem with DreamHost seems to be fixed. That means that regardless of your DNS, the site will load. In the next day or so, everyone will get the Pair version of the site, but we’ll obviously keep both around while that change propagates. That will hopefully be the end of the troubles. We’ll be featuring the deals from this abbreviated/spotty day 3 on day 4 as well, so tomorrow (12/4), there will be a full 10 deals for users.

To summarize: we’re back, and I believe we’ll be up for the rest of the month without further problems.

-Paul

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