By 10pm tonight, robohara.com and all the other websites I host (podcast.robohara.com, review-o-matic.com, and lovethyshelf.com) had been down for almost 24 hours. The last time my web server was down for 24 hours was in June of 2009, when I built the current server I’m using and converted my physical web server into a virtual one.

For the fourth time in as many weeks, I came home to find my web server powered off. Personally I’ve only ever had this happen a few times: once time was due to a blown capacitor; every other time was due to overheating. I figured it was the latter and stuck a fan up to the case to buy me some time. The server ran for three or four days before shutting down again. Tonight after work I had to go do some shopping; 10pm was the first chance I got to evaluate the situation.

My original guess was right. My server has 4 fans in it — one in the power supply, two in the case itself, and a fourth on the CPU. The one on the CPU was the only one still spinning. Of the two in the case, one had completely locked up and the other was simply buzzing. The one in the power supply was dead too, which was most likely the culprit.

Several years ago while throwing some old computers away I (for such an occasion) ripped out all the fans and saved them. It took me half an hour to find them, but after I did, transplanting them into my server only took about half an hour. I fired everything up about 30 minutes ago and, so far, everything looks okay.

The downside to being your own server admin/hosting solution is that when things go bad, there’s no one else around to fix them. The upside is, during those times, you know that the issue’s being worked on. ;)