Published: Thu 29 January 2026
By Rory Hartong-Redden
In blog .
tags: web projects
According to git history I started work on "Activity Title" in August 2024.
It's advertised on my Projects page.
The user I'm targeting is me.
This is a hobby project that I made available to the public and it has maybe 20 users.
It's been hosted on Fly.io and, for over a year, it's been a low-maintenance project that "just worked".
The monthly cost was below $5 so it was free to me.
Earlier this week I tried logging in to activitytitle.com and was greeted with this error on Firefox
Secure Connection Failed
An error occurred during a connection to activitytitle . com . PR_END_OF_FILE_ERROR
Error code : PR_END_OF_FILE_ERROR
The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified .
Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem .
The domain was fine so the security angle was a red-herring.
The fly domain, https://strava-deck.fly.dev/, gave the same error.
Something is busted!
The fly machine was down so I tried redeploying it.
> fly deploy
> ....
> fly logs
[ PR04 ] could not find a good candidate within 40 attempts at load balancing
I checked the fly.toml and Dockerfile -- but nothing had changed lately.
After a night of debugging I identified that the issue is the volume.
[mounts]
source = "deck_data"
destination = "/data"
If I comment this out the machine runs and the website returns a different error (progress!).
In the logs I see Django errors because there's no database, which is expected (the database is a file in the volume).
Just when I was about the wipe it all and recreate the volume I found this support post from an old-school Google search:
https://community.fly.io/t/machine-suspended-and-it-wont-start-again-not-another-post-about-cold-start/24984/4
The trick is forking the volume, creating a copy, and deleting the old volume.
The new fork volume attaches to a machine like magic and we're running just like before with all data restored.
Conclusion
What did I learn from this ordeal?
Fly.io is a little janky.
And my website is janky too.
But, hey, they're free so don't complain.