Horrible Stack Overflow at Coding Horror

At sometime around 10:40am on December 11th, 2009, both Coding Horror and the Stack Overflow Blog disappeared when their host, CrystalTech, lost the VM on which they run. Coding Horror was immediately replaced with this:

Coding Horror experienced 100% data loss at our hosting provider, CrystalTech.

I have some backups and I’ll try to get it up and running ASAP!

According to his Tweets, however, Atwood soon discovered that all backups were on the very virtual machine which was lost.

This is all rather ironic, since Jeff himself blogged about how important backups are. The record of this is currently only available via Google Cache. Within the blog post, he did mention the potential of Google Cache as a backup system, so perhaps this is just his admission that second-rate backups are good enough for him:

while Google may be a great service, it’s only a so-so backup mechanism.

This, of course, has the Internet falling over in alternating fits of schadenfreude and irony.