Phew!
Well, that has been a stressful few days thanks to website and hosting issues, which is also my excuse for not posting anything here for a few days.
I don’t think anyone is still quite sure what went wrong, but the server upon which my sites and many of my clients sites are hosted decided to throw a bit of a wobbler. There were all sorts of errors showing up. Some sites had disappeared altogether, others were displaying database connection errors, some had weird issues going on such as certain links redirecting to pages they shouldn’t have and certain forms and page elements missing. One site was even pointing to another completely unrelated site. There were php version problems, cURL issues preventing some sites communicating successfully with external servers and mod_rewrite errors on some sites too. Some clients were having issues with emails, others weren’t, the whole thing was a mess!
What was really strange was that some sites on the server were working completely normally.
I therefore spent most of the weekend and all of Monday and Tuesday in various forms of contact with the hosting company as we tried to resolve the issues. It was all very frustrating as I often seemed to be going around in circles with emails and chat sessions. In the end as I seemed to be getting nowhere I had to email the hosting company management and then finally started to make some progress. Once the management team were on the case I suggested that they move all of my accounts to a new server seeing as they clearly couldn’t get the server the accounts were currently hosted on working properly. They agreed to this and decided that they would do that for everyone on the server at the weekend. That was too long for me to wait considering all of the problems my clients were facing so I negotiated with them to move my accounts with immediate effect.
They did so, migrating all of my accounts across to a new server yesterday afternoon whilst I was on a Skype conversation with the hosting company management. That migration completed last night and I made the necessary changes to my private name servers so that domain names would start resolving to the new server.
As you can imagine, this was all very stressful as some of my clients sites weren’t working I and they were getting worried about them. I had a few sleepless nights whilst working through the issues and kept my clients up to date with the problems throughout. Most were of course understanding and realised that I was doing all within my powers to fix the situation. The trouble is when it is the hosting server that is causing the problems there is very little I can do other than keep pestering the hosting company to sort things out at their end, and that in itself can be a frustrating and stressful experience. Not really being able to do anything is probably the most stressful part of a situation like this as you feel completely helpless.
As of this morning I’m feeling a little less stressed though. The migration to a new server appears to have largely completed and most sites are now up and running as they should be. There are still a few issues to iron out and a few sites that are still missing but hopefully all will be sorted soon and I’ll be able to get some proper sleep.
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Time for a run now just to real ease some more of the stress and tension…
Glad it’s sorted, enjoy your run x