What we found out when this website broke.

Last Friday, by 6 p.m, Shane and I were so groggy that we decided to take a nap. The plan was to have a nice laid back Friday night where we'd wake up from our nap, cook dinner, open a bottle of wine and watch a movie. By 6:15 p.m, we were in bed and when we woke up from our nap, it was 9 o'clock...in the morning...of the next day. We actually slept for close to 15 hours and still have no idea how that happened. All we know is that it was the best nap of our lives.

Before getting out of bed on Saturday morning to make breakfast (we hadn't eaten in about 20 hours), I checked my blog analytics. That was a very weird thing for me to do because I usually avoid checking my stats as much as I can because that's a black hole that sucks you in without warning. I tend to check my stats only towards the end of the week to determine which posts did well that week, and usually try to completely avoid looking at it during the weekend. But since I lost my entire Friday evening to the best nap of my life, I decided to take the plunge into the black hole as soon as I woke up. What I saw sent shivers down my spine because surely, my post about my January Favourites was not so bad that only 1/50th of my readers visited the website on that day? Although that seemed really off, I decided to ignore that fact and proceeded to the kitchen.

While I was in the middle of buttering my pan with one hand and breaking an egg open with the other, my mother called. She has this skill of calling exactly when it's most inconvenient for me to answer her calls. She's called multiple times while I was in the shower (thus disrupting the playlist I was listening to), she's called while I was mopping the floors and completely out of breath, she's called right as I tried to open the door to my home with multiple grocery bags in each hand, and my favourite times are those when she's called while I was on the throne, enjoying my little game of Candy Crush. And each of those times, I have answered her calls. Yes, even from the throne because that makes her very uncomfortable.

So this time, even though I was in the middle of performing circus tricks with eggs, frying pans, and butter, I still managed to answer her call. And boy, was I glad I didn't ignore that call.

She told me she'd been trying to read my latest blog post all morning but the website didn't load on any of her attempts. I immediately understood what was going on with my stats, and Shane and I dropped all the eggs and frying pans to tend to this matter. It turned out that our website broke at around 6 p.m on Friday and we were never informed. And because we were unconscious since exactly that time, we never checked the website even for comments. Nothing made sense, I had a mini heart attack, and it was a clusterfuck.

The first step was to fix the issue and get everything up and running. Once that was achieved, we had to do damage control by apologizing to you guys and letting you know what had happened. The third step was to ensure that something like this would never happen again. And the final step was to dig deep and find out what exactly went wrong. It's this final step that made everything better because all the frustration disappeared when we realised that you guys were the ones who broke this website (and I'm not even mad at you for that).

For some reason, Friday's post, the one that I thought people must have hated because they didn't want to read it, got a lot more clicks than usual and the traffic exceeded the limit of our bandwidth, which led to an inevitable crash and burn. If we'd been up, we would have noticed this and fixed it immediately but we're very sorry for the inconvenience caused. We immediately switched to a new plan so as to support the load of newcomers to this blog and we couldn't be happier to have you all hanging out with us! Once the issue got fixed and we made sure that blaring alarms would go off on our phones the next time the website crashed, we let you know that you could now visit the blog. And we've been having so many of you around since then that it's been a truly wonderful learning process.

Sometimes, the best things in life come disguised as trouble and it's only once you power through your problems and come out the other side to analyze what went wrong that you find hidden gems amidst chaos. It's beautiful how things always work out in the end. I just want to thank you all for being my hidden gems and for visiting, reading, showing support and reaching out to me. You literally turned my frown upside down when I realised what had actually happened, and you contribute in such big ways to my overall happiness and wellbeing. I couldn't be more grateful! THANK YOU!