The blog has, per Pingdom report, missed exactly one check this month for 3 minutes of downtime. The previous downtime was in the first week of January, when it was offline for several hours as I carried out major maintenance.
During this streak we had the 7000 unique traffic dump on this post. This is a vast improvement, especially as fairly small traffic spikes in short periods of time used to kick it over even though it has 3GB of expensive RAM. Pingdom reckons I’m at “>99.99%” uptime for the period although it won’t credit me with that fifth nine, dammit. That’s a pity because I’d love to blow off The Phone Company types (or indeed Google SREs) who go on about “carrier-grade” this or that by saying “Well, my blog has five nines of uptime…”
How did it happen? Dead simple. I upgraded all the way from Ubuntu 12.04LTS to 16.04.3 and further caught up with a lot of other packages. At one point I had to reinstall PHP. I also cleaned up a lot of configuration stuff. I am not even using a static page plugin or a cache, but let’s see about the next maintenance moment for that.