As of just a few minutes ago, mikel.org is back on the air.
The month-long absence of this site was caused by a very unfortunate problem with the company who I used to use as a virtual host, PlanetESS, based in Toronto. They managed to completely munge the box this site and probably thousands of others were on, and they somehow managed to overwrite their backup in the process. Everything on the server was lost.
Since I only moved over to Movable Type a few months ago I had most of the old content backed up, but I hadn’t done that for the more recent stuff. So I had to re-install MT on a new host (the so far excellent BlackSun), rebuild all the templates from local copies and re-write some that I had put together quickly only on the lost server. Luckily Google came to the rescue – it had cached my whole site and though it required some manual and BBEdit-assisted work, I think I got most, if not all, of the content back and then deployed most of it last night.
Lessons from this experience? No matter how tempting, and how simple it seems, keep a local backup of everything on your server. It’s not always simple to do, but it would have saved me lots of effort.
tbit says
In the past three weeks at least 7 people I know lost their sites due to catastrophic failures on part of the hosting company. Is something going around that only affects servers?
Michael says
Maybe we were all with the same company? I am pretty sure both Ed and Bill were with PlanetESS (before Ed moved to TypePad on his part) and MJ Milloy was as well, though he had pretty much stopped his weblog a while back.
Bill says
Yep, we were all PlanetESS. It’s a pity, hey had really good customer service in the first year I was hosted there, then it all went straight to hell. My site was down three times at least this year for close to a full day each time with NOTHING from them, and nothing on their site to indicate why… then, contacting me only after my site had been down for three days, they matter-of-factly told me to restore my own damn site (without ever actually saying that they had lost their backups, though that was obvious), that was it.
Grr.
blork says
Mikel, welcome back.
I feel really bad for having recommended PlanetESS to so many people. That last meltdown was just stupid. Fortunately I didn’t loose anything because (a) I’m on TypePad and (b) I do other things the old -fashioned way (i.e., build the stuff on my machine then bulk-load it all up via FTP, so there’s always a mirror on my machine).
I would have ditched PlanetESS right away except I just finished paying for another year (two domains) and with my move and all I couldn’t handle any more complexity.
The part you may not know is that they have changed their UNIX servers over to Linux. The old pricing plan that used to give 5MB of disk space now gives 100MB. So I called them up about a week before the melt-down and said “change me over to the Linux plan” and they told me they were in the middle of changing everyone over (in chunks) and that we’d be notified when it was our turn. Next thing you know, BOOM!
I really think their quality control is rock-bottom. I get the impression it’s a bunch of eager-beavers in there who have no idea of process, and they’re just shuffling things around like it’s nothing more important than their personal MP3 files. Bastards!
Michael says
They still haven’t called me back about my cancellation following the outage. And I can’t get through on the phone…
It’s funny though – I’d forgotten that YOU had recommended them to ME – and a week ago I checked your typepad blog to make sure that you had everything in there. Because I though I had done the recommending! But of course you used them for other things before I even started blogging.
Bill says
I must say, their accounting department have been good to me since I told them to kill my account; we’ve had to exchange a lot of emails over issues with my domain ownership, and they’ve been pretty cool about being nice to me even after I was no longer a paying customer.
Email to accountingATeol.ca always gets me a fairly rapid response.
michael says
Good to know Bill – thanks a lot. Did you get a refund for unused time? I imagined that would be standard, but I haven’t heard word 1.
Unlike Blacksun, who have been fabulous. Their info upon signing up was first-rate, no info missing, and someone from tech support actually gave me a call to welcome me to the service and let me know that they could help with lots of special config I might need or whatever.
Bill says
The badness fortuitously coincided with my contract renewal; I actually ended up with maybe a free week of hosting when I cancelled, because they just killed the new invoice.
Hosting Matters are also great, no complaints there at all. Every single ticket I’ve written has been answered within minutes and they’re ultra-friendly and helpful.