Server failure offs Wasilla's Web site, temporarily

Sept. 27, 2005

MARY AMES\Frontiersman reporter

WASILLA - On a Monday morning earlier this month, Jamie Newman, deputy clerk for Wasilla, came to work and found the city's Web site missing. No one could access city information online.

The call went out immediately to get the city of Wasilla back on the Web, but it wasn't fast or simple.

The company that hosts the city servers had a catastrophic failure, according to Ted Leonard, the city's finance director.

"There was a fire," Leonard said. "The server literally burned up. But in the last four years of hosting the site, this is the only time."

An Anchorage company, Octavient, hosts the site, according to company owner Wayne Saucier.

"There was smoke, but not fire," Saucier said. "The motherboard failed and short-circuited both hard drives. It was a Dell server, and about a week later I got a call from Dell saying that model server was being recalled because of motherboard failures. The server was on warranty, but I didn't get the four-hour response time they promised."

Octavienthad backup copies of the site, and so does the city. But because the site is dynamic, allowing user interaction, each department had to review the backups for correct information and links. For example, people can apply for business licenses, connect or disconnect from city utilities, apply for airport tie-downs and apply for automatic payments on the site.

"It was a lot of Humpty Dumptys to put back together," Saucier said. "We have a backup server, but it isn't the same model. So we had to replace it in bits and pieces."

Octavient hosts about 80 sites, all of them lost in the motherboard failure, Saucier said. Some of the sites are static, just pushing information out and not changing, and those were easier to put back up.

Wasilla's site, which Octavient hosts for about $600 a year, wasn't as easy.

What Wasilla has is a premium package with custom applications, he said, adding that it is one of the more complicated Web sites he hosts.

The city of Wasilla's community survey indicates 23 percent of residents use the site, Leonard said. Getting the calls when the site went down was further proof that people do indeed use the site.

"After that Wednesday we got some calls about it," Leonard said. "We were happy to get the calls and to know that people are using the site."

The bright spot, Leonard said, is that the loss of the server forced each department to comb through its pages on the site and make sure everything was up to date. Every department upload had to have approvals with the department manager, which is a complicated process, Leonard said.

"It looks better now," he said. "It's the rainbow at the end of indigestion."

The city hopes to offer more services on its site by March, Leonard said, which is something 73 percent of survey respondents want.

Along with offering more, the city hopes to bring the servers in house, he said. The plan is to have a server farm at the police station, where there is security and air conditioning, two things vital to servers.

"Once it's in house, we'd have more control over bringing it back up," he said. "Our worry is to balance security with hosting."

Contact Mary Ames at 352-2284 or mary.ames@

frontiersman.com.