Dave
Staff member
Yesterday about 3:30 PM, everything went dark. I tried opening a ticket, but the host's site was dark as well. Uh oh.
I contacted the host on another site we both frequent and he was trying to find out what was going on. Apparently, the company he leases his servers from suspended his account without warning. On these servers there were about 200 sites (IIRC) all using XenForo. Now, with XF having the ability to send an email on a post, the server center decided that the number of emails being sent out meant that it had to be spammers. So they flagged all the servers as spam farms and suspended the accounts. It took almost all night for Mike (the host) to get them to turn things back on. When I last spoke with him it was 3 am and he was still working on it.
The bad part? Even though we had hourly backups, it didn't help as they were unable to be used on any other servers. I honestly thought by the time I went to bed that the fat lady had sung and that we'd lost everything.
So what does this mean for us? Let me tell you.
I contacted the host on another site we both frequent and he was trying to find out what was going on. Apparently, the company he leases his servers from suspended his account without warning. On these servers there were about 200 sites (IIRC) all using XenForo. Now, with XF having the ability to send an email on a post, the server center decided that the number of emails being sent out meant that it had to be spammers. So they flagged all the servers as spam farms and suspended the accounts. It took almost all night for Mike (the host) to get them to turn things back on. When I last spoke with him it was 3 am and he was still working on it.
The bad part? Even though we had hourly backups, it didn't help as they were unable to be used on any other servers. I honestly thought by the time I went to bed that the fat lady had sung and that we'd lost everything.
So what does this mean for us? Let me tell you.
- We are not changing hosts. It was not Mike's fault and he is already taking steps to move to a better server farm with redundancy. He thought he had it before and didn't. But the dude worked his ass off to get things back up and that's got to be worth something.
- My backup site, nihsen.com, was woefully inadequate for the task at hand. I thought it would be easy enough to go over there, but it proved to be insufficient for our needs in both bandwidth and ease of use. And the spammers got there first, which sucked. Don't know how they do it. I'll be working on a separate plan of action for backups in the future.
- I'm going to be running a separate backup of my own and downloading it to my drive. I hadn't done it in the past because it slows down the site and we were having issues with it at the time. Now that I've got the Piwik fixed, I'll be setting up a cron to take care of this.
Dave is the champion, Dave's friends. And Dave keeps on fighting to the end!
