Vidan
December 15th, 2019, 11:08 PM
Hi everyone,
Quick status update on the forum server issues.
On Friday, Sharifu informed me people were unable to access the forum -- thanks to those on Facebook who reported the issue (I don't have a Facebook account at the moment, but I'm thinking maybe I should?). I confirmed the server was down, logged in to the account for my web host with the intention of filing a ticket, and was reminded that the company's hosting plans and pricing tiers were changing. This was something I had seen in an email earlier this year, and at the time it sounded like there would be no action required on my part. This was around the time Lea was getting inundated with spam registrations, so my email was getting flooded with notifications about new users, and I failed to notice followup emails about the hosting change, which basically stated all files and databases would be moved to a new physical server at the beginning of October and that the domain nameservers would need to be updated at that time. The recent multi-day outage, as far as I can tell, was from the old servers being taken offline (I'm surprised they were up for so long). In any case, I located the emails I had overlooked and switched over the nameservers per their instructions.
The end result is the forum is once again active on an upgraded server, but we've lost about 2 months of posts. As there was no server-to-server database backup solution in place, those 2 months' worth of posts are unrecoverable. My long-term goal had always been to migrate Lea to a server where I could set up processes for automated backups that happen at least weekly, and indeed I have been working on this slowly over the past year, but I'm not quite there yet. Of course, this is a reminder that regular manual backups are also important, and I'll aim to take more regular manual database backups moving forward (the last one I have is from September, so a bit older than the current state of the forum).
This was definitely an oversight on my part, so I apologize for the missing posts. No admin likes to admit they messed up, but I am ready to take this as a learning opportunity. That being said, I think with the new servers in place Lea should be a lot more reliable than it was.
Quick status update on the forum server issues.
On Friday, Sharifu informed me people were unable to access the forum -- thanks to those on Facebook who reported the issue (I don't have a Facebook account at the moment, but I'm thinking maybe I should?). I confirmed the server was down, logged in to the account for my web host with the intention of filing a ticket, and was reminded that the company's hosting plans and pricing tiers were changing. This was something I had seen in an email earlier this year, and at the time it sounded like there would be no action required on my part. This was around the time Lea was getting inundated with spam registrations, so my email was getting flooded with notifications about new users, and I failed to notice followup emails about the hosting change, which basically stated all files and databases would be moved to a new physical server at the beginning of October and that the domain nameservers would need to be updated at that time. The recent multi-day outage, as far as I can tell, was from the old servers being taken offline (I'm surprised they were up for so long). In any case, I located the emails I had overlooked and switched over the nameservers per their instructions.
The end result is the forum is once again active on an upgraded server, but we've lost about 2 months of posts. As there was no server-to-server database backup solution in place, those 2 months' worth of posts are unrecoverable. My long-term goal had always been to migrate Lea to a server where I could set up processes for automated backups that happen at least weekly, and indeed I have been working on this slowly over the past year, but I'm not quite there yet. Of course, this is a reminder that regular manual backups are also important, and I'll aim to take more regular manual database backups moving forward (the last one I have is from September, so a bit older than the current state of the forum).
This was definitely an oversight on my part, so I apologize for the missing posts. No admin likes to admit they messed up, but I am ready to take this as a learning opportunity. That being said, I think with the new servers in place Lea should be a lot more reliable than it was.