Welcome to the new server, sorry for the trouble

[The Other Dr. Z]

Thanks!!!

As you may have guessed I was very busy...

[TodFitch]

My posts are usually boring but I guess I could create at test post for you. . .

[The Other Dr. Z]

Can someone post ANYTHING just so I know it works?!?

[The Other Dr. Z]

Wow, that took longer than expected.

However we are BACK and on the new server.

[The Other Dr. Z]

Reminder: We shut down a bit before 3 pm Eastern time today and come back probably by 4 pm.

[The Other Dr. Z]

I figure the ten seconds is handy for avoiding email loss... I don't mind a bit of extra DNS querying!

We have a time: 3 pm tomorrow. Just before that, I'll shut down the forum. The other service is handling  the move since I have limited access to the essentials here.

Thanks, TodFitch. I appreciate your understanding.

[TodFitch]

The first step of this process is to change all the DNS refresh times to 10 seconds instead of one day. I am doing this now, so it'll be a day or two before the actual change occurs so that people aren't seeing different versions of the site.

Five or ten minutes for refresh is enough to make moving the site fairly easy and makes access faster because each visitor's web browser won't trigger a DNS query on every action.

Thank you so much for your work on this. I maintain a few web services for some volunteer organizations and know that there are times when everything goes wrong and a lot of work is needed to get things sorted. So I know a bit about your situation. Again, thank you so much!

[The Other Dr. Z]

The first step of this process is to change all the DNS refresh times to 10 seconds instead of one day. I am doing this now, so it'll be a day or two before the actual change occurs so that people aren't seeing different versions of the site.

[The Other Dr. Z]

Earlier this week, a major data center in Secaucus had an "event." They claim a single battery caught fire. At the time, they said everything would be back to normal in 3-4 hours. That time expanded to 8 hours, an 8 hours which kept moving, — like "free beer tomorrow!"

While we had offsite backups, the host was maintaining those and refused to allow us to access them, or to reassemble the site somewhere else during the outage. After all, we'd be back to normal in a few hours. "A few" here is defined as "45."

I think it's safe to say I regret choosing this vendor. The long and the short of it is that as soon as possible, I will need to move the POC to a new server - and rework the way the offsite backups are done. The move will likely be invisible to you.

I apologize for the insane reasons this site was out for so long. The data center company was misleading to its customers, and the customer we use refused to take action. It's time to move on.