And that’s me being VERRRRRY ladylike!
This afternoon I was contacted by one of my hosting companies who told me that the server that one of my biggest sites is hosted on was busy dying!!
AAAAARGH!!!! … BEEEG PANIC!
This site is crucial to us and to have it go down or lose data would be a HUGE train smash.
Anyway, they had already formulated a plan – clever chaps. Thank goodness. They said they were going to transfer all the data to a new server for me. That’s huge – it’s about 2.5G after it’s all zipped up – would have taken weeks to upload! (Yeah, I’ve done it myself before when we move servers and it DID literally take weeks!) Their plan was to then use one of the pointer domains to test the newly-transferred site and then, once I was happy, to sort the DNS (domain name server) out so that our regular URL (domain / web address) would point to the new server.
So that’s what happened and so far, so good – the data has been copied and testing is looking ok. We’ve found one or two glitches that have arisen as a result of the new server configuration not being identical to the last – they had done a LOT of tweaks on it for me.
But we’re almost ready to sort the DNS out and hopefully that transfer will happen pretty quickly so that the site is not down for too long. Lawd knows that would be HELL to deal with … and I definitely don’t feel like nearly 2000 angry clients climbing all over me right now!!
The hosting company has been fantastic! They’ve really pulled out all the stops for me on this one. I’m very grateful to have such a jacked team managing my server.
Whew … WHAT a day!
I’m completely shattered, can’t wait to just crawl into bed and do diddlysquat!
@BigFriendly – YIKES!! That’s a mission and a half!
Yeah, although I think (?) the “own server” deal is cheaper, I don’t think I could do the self-managed server thing. Apart from the fact that I don’t have your hardware and networking skills, I think time would be a big problem for me.
I am very willing to part with cash if it saves me time … and that goes for ANYTHING 😀
I can relate. I have my own server with Hetzner and it started taking strain about a month ago. I had to setup the whole LAMP stack on a new server myself and move 22 domains with about 9GB of data. Install and move took a whole day. DNS update was a little hairy.
@Steve – ALMOST all done … DNS update is happening as we speak …
@Justin – Yeah, I specifically didn’t want to mention their name unless someone asked for it – I didn’t want it to look like I was giving them a plug, especially since they’ve just sent me a free ADSL modem router and given me a free ADSL account for 12 months.
WooHoo 🙂
It’s WebOnline – I’ve had this site with them since ’99 and they seriously rock!! I tried hosting it overseas for a little while because bandwidth is so expensive, but it was a total disaster and I moved back to them very quickly. I’d rather pay more and get their brilliant service …
look on the bright side, at least its all done now 🙂 Great hosting company though!
Who’s the hosting company? Always good to know who the good guys are!!!