And now, we’re back

Here’s the story:  some of my web host‘s machines took a dive and took all of my sites with them.  The sites went down sometime on Sunday, December 14th.  At some point email went down, too.  I didn’t receive anything between 8:02 AM and 4:23 PM on December 15th.  I noticed that my sites were down because I keep my installation of Tracks in one of the default tabs in my web browser.  But Tracks is a Rails app, and they don’t run all that well on Dreamhost.  So, at first, I assumed it was just a server error.  When a few reloads didn’t fix it, I headed over to Dreamhost to file a ticket.  That’s when I learned the bad news.  
      

On Monday, I was too busy with various end-of-semester necessities to worry much about my sites, though I always feel anxious when any of my stuff is down.  After some experimentation, I found I was able to connect to my sites via SFTP.  So I downloaded copies of all the most important files.  In the meantime, Dreamhost finally contacted me via email at 7:18 AM on Tuesday, December 16th.  But their message wasn’t encouraging:

“Unfortunately, because of the file server problems, in order to get your sites back up, you will now need to REUPLOAD [sic] all your content. We are still trying to recover the data from peeler, but at this point it looks like that process may take a few days, if it is even possible at all.”

You know, since Haden was born, I’ve been pretty good about backing up the family media, but I can’t remember the last time I did a backup of all my web sites. I assumed that some sort of redundancy was part of my hosting plan, but I could be entirely wrong on that.  And, in either case, it’s always good to have your own backups, even if you host does provide some sort of backup service.  But it is, unfortunately an easy thing to blow off.

In the meantime, DH provisioned a new server and copied my directory structure over to it.  But the files themselves were going to take longer to move over (“by Friday at the LATEST . . .,” an email from 1:09 PM on the 16th assured me in all caps).  But, in the meantime, they were encouraging users to restore via SFTP.

And that’s what I’m doing right now.  I’m watching a progress bar as Cyberduck shoots the files that comprise wheatblog.com across the internet.  I’m composing this in post Google Docs.

DH credited my account with what amounts to six months of free hosting.  And I guess that’s pretty nice of them.  But the extensive downtime and lack of substantive communication leave me feeling very uncertain about hosting my sites with them.  There are a lot of things about DH that I like, but no one ever accused them of being the most stable web host out there.