One of the cool benefits of working at MSFT is the ability to participate in some of our dog food efforts, this site along with several others I run are hosted by one such initiatives at the company.
The downside of this is that this free hosting is expected to go down from time to time, last week there was a datacenter power outage and in the process of bringing everything back up it looks like one of the switches that front ends the trafic for the machine hosting my stuff lost some configuration settings that resulted in requests being dropped.
I didn’t have the time to file a request to get this fixed until this week but they took care of the problem as soon as it was brought to their attention, that’s what I call service!
When they resolved this issue they also told me they have recently moved me to a new beefy machine, the old machine was a single processor machine running a early beta of WS2008 with 4GB of ram but the new one is 8GB, two dual core processors and WS2008 RTM!
They tell me the new machine can handle a "site density" of up to 5,000 sites, that’s impressive!
We just had our WS2008 ship party last week, I actually didn’t get to attend due to a conflict the press is saying nice things about it, one of my favorites being from Tom Yager who said Windows Server 2008 “is an upgrade that IT can't refuse, … that eats commercial Linux “.
In any event, I suspect things will be running better now; let me know if you notice an outage or something odd.