Friday, September 30, 2011

Fixing Web Sites

My content web sites have been down for the last two months.

Bad things keep happening to me.

First, I made the mistake of entering a long term hosting contract with a second rate outfit called FastNext.com. I have two years left on the contract.

Anyway, Fastnext had some sort of server failure a month or so ago. My account was full of dump files as if the hard drive failed. Perhaps it was hacked?

I've had problems in the past when they had problems and restored old versions of the site. So, the code on my FastNext server is all jumbled.

The last time FastNext restored my account, they turned off the functionality that let me run PHP in files with the .html extension.

Earlier this year, I had purchased a cloud hosting account with WestHost for the Community Color sites. Since my content sites don't have much traffic, I decide to piggy back them on my WestHost cloud account.

Fearing that FastNext was hacked, I reworked the site from scratch before uploading it to WestHost. This took about 80 hours.

As I was completing the migration from FastNext to WestHost, my WestHost cloud server suffered a catastrophic hardware failure.

This hardware failure took several weeks to resolve.

So, I now have two versions of my content sites. An older version is sitting on FastNext and a newer version on WestHost.

I have absolutely no reason to think that the code on WestHost has a problem, but I am too paranoid to turn it on.

To make matters worse. I hit an elk last month. It cost $2K to fix my car. I don't want to spend the money on a new server until I pay off the repairs.

I think I've worked out a way to get the sites to run on the FastNext server and will start turning the sites back on.

I will start with Poems of Sunny Colorado. This is a simple poetry book my great aunt Susie wrote back in the 1920s.

2 comments:

data center said...

It's pretty easy to fix a website if you only have time for it. Your online support can also be of great help or maybe it's just a simple problem in one of their data center.

y-intercept said...

I fear that most web hosts were forced to lay off their support staffs. It is very difficult to contact the support staff for hosts these days.

When you get a hold of customer support, they are willing to do only so much.

Unfortunately, the only real solution is for people to be prepared to move to a new host at a drop of pin.