Useful SaaS Apps For Individuals and Businesses
September 7, 2020 — I have a slew of good news and bad news after radio silence for several months. As many of you who used our services and products are well aware: nothing works except the main blog that I run, Confessions of the Professions. If you're wondering exactly what happened, I was running our products on a single dedicated server. While it was a very speedy and powerful server, the Bare Metal Server from Vultr, and I did have a lot of backup systems in place, unfortunately, everything — in a perfect storm — crashed.
On July 25, 2020, I went to login to a few of our websites and found they were down. While attempting to restart and restore the server, nothing was coming back up. I then attempted to unzip some files, which therein lied the problem. A zip file somehow went rogue and landed at the root of all directories, causing several important files to be overwritten, and taking down the entire server. No problem! I had a backup server! After logging in to check it, I noticed the file size was far below the standard of what it normally is, only to realize the backup server failed receive the file from the main server, probably due to the fact that when it went to download the newly created file, it was unable to make contact with the main server. Thus, everything was down, and while I made every effort possible to restore it, even contacting Vultr, it was a doomed server and there was nothing I could do.
Fortunately, there is a backup of several of our earlier web applications, though I did end up losing about three web applications I had recently built within the past few months prior to the crash. While all this was happening, I was in the middle of a major project involving 530 women and 34 men, known as the My Life As A Woman Project Initative. The project lasted from May 5, 2020 to August 28, 2020, with some remnants for marketing still upcoming in the new few months.
Due to the My Life As A Woman Project Initative, I was delayed in getting the web applications back up and running and I even left up the old ones as a reminder with a message that NoteToServices would not be back until 2021, though it is only partially correct. I will not be bringing back every web application in the NoteToServices portfolio, for which I had built 18 of them along with three WordPress plugins. While most of the web applications had a reasonable amount of customers to keep the server running, fund a variety of different projects, and pay for domains, I am solely going to focus on the ones I feel were very promising in acquiring new customers to continue funding these types of project. As a result, I am taking the company in a slightly new direction and rather than focusing on web applications that performed a variety of different random functions and tasks, I will be more focused on building API systems that integrate with third-party applcations for developers and WordPress plugins. I will still be working on several applications that will be useful to various companies and non-developers, but the majority of applications will be focused on API.
I will also be working on ensuring that all web applications are backed up through Github and provided with surefire backup systems so that I can work on guaranteeing that products and services built by NoteToServices will never go down nor experience anything as traumatic as what happpened, especially for my customers who were relying on my services. If you're still here or reading this, I appreciate your patience and I do sincerely apologize for everything that happened. While I have made the decision not to return back to a Bare Metal Server, I will be using several High Frequency VPS that specialize in speed and power. I look forward to seeing you through the rest of 2020, in 2021, and beyond. Thank you so much for your patience and support!