August 24, 2021
Patience, Grasshopper
Thank you so much to everyone who wrote in to let me know that my website was down today.
The messages fell into a few categories:
- “The Ditcherville comic from Sunday’s email won’t load for me!”
- “I’m getting a broken links in your Twitter posts!”
- “Your proposal template is missing!”
And as bad as it felt to let all these people down, the effect that it had on my daily workflow was even worse:
- I had a coaching call with private student and I couldn’t pull up my sales page template for us to work from
- I couldn’t send today’s email without a painful workaround that would require clean-up work later
- I had to alert my group coaching members updated about the situation because they couldn’t access their knowledge-base until the server was back up
It was truly disorienting to have lost access to what feels like a part of my brain. It was like I had a stroke or something.
Here’s the thing…
A few years ago, I would have FREAKED OUT if my website was down.
I would have dropped everything and done anything to stand up a new server from a backup.
Today - perhaps older and wiser - I decided not to.
Why?
- I knew what the problem was - my hosting company (Digital Ocean) had an unexpected hardware failure
- I knew that they were working on it - DO had emailed me before I even knew about the issue and promised to update once they had more info
- And most importantly, I knew from past experience that me nuking my day to create and configure a new server would probably result in months of unpleasant surprises
So I simply waited.
Not because it wasn’t really bad that people (including me) could not get access to my content.
I decided to wait because I knew that my hosting company had more to lose from the outage than I did, and they probably had a bunch of good people working on it on my behalf, and therefore they would almost certainly beat me to a solution.
And guess what?
A few hours later, everything was 100% back to normal.
And I didn’t have to nuke my day.
And I am not facing weeks of annoying exception cleanup.
Of course, if this sort of thing started happening in the regular, I’d probably look into a more robust solution.
But for now, patience won the day.
Yours,
—J
P.S. The next session of The Pricing Seminar is launching in September.
If you’re ready to start getting paid what you’re worth, add your name to the announcement list so you don’t miss out:
I hope to see you there.