Persona’s fibre-optic cable connecting its Pontiac-area customers — in Bryson, Campbell’s Bay, Île-du-Grand-Calumet and Shawville — to the rest of the world was cut at about 2:30 yesterday afternoon. It’s taken until about half an hour ago to be reconnected; I’ve been offline in the meantime, naturally.

Fibre cuts can sometimes mean days of downtime even for large population centres, so I should count myself lucky that I’ve only been off for 18 hours. Still, for a web junkie like me, 18 hours can feel like forever.

One of the things that bugged me about Blogger, in re the preceding entry, was that it represented an additional point of failure. Most of the time, when doing my web projects, I have to deal with a minimum of two: my ISP, Persona; and my hosting company, DreamHost. Both are far from perfect: Persona’s DNS server has an annoying habit of crashing, sometimes several times a day, which means I’m off for a minimum of half an hour each time. And the server on which my domains are hosted periodically reboots, meaning that they’re unavailable for 20 minutes or so — which isn’t bad, considering, but those 20 minutes always seem to happen when I’m trying to do something. (To their credit, DreamHost is always excellent in keeping its customers advised of serious problems, so I’m reasonably happy with them.)

Adding a third point of failure was just asking for it, I guess. (Probably one reason why I went to Movable Type last fall.) All things considered, though, everything held up reasonably well during last week’s craziness. I shouldn’t complain too much.