Lost Blog
The server where this blog and the rest of my site is co-located died last night, taking my blog with it. Thankfully, the database is intact, but it is quite possible that email to me may have vanished into the aether.
I am rather cross to discover that my hosting service do not back up user’s home directories, but rather rely on their RAID disk drives to protect data (which in this case they didn’t) and otherwise expect users to backup their own data. Sadly, I’m not sure if I kept a local copy of my Phlogiston WordPress theme. (The theme you are probably seeing right now is the WordPress 1.5 default theme.) Sigh. I have also lost all of the WordPress plugins that I had installed, and so will now have to re-install those by hand.
I’m still in Cambridge, and will be returning this coming weekend. I’ll catch up with my email once I’m back, when I’ll also try and get my blog back to how it was.
May 5th, 2005 at 1:59 am
Who is your hosting service? I had been feeling a bit miffed that my (free) ISP hadn’t responded to my emails for an upgrade. I don’t feel quite so miffed now.
Is tihs the first time your hosts have let you down?
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May 5th, 2005 at 10:28 am
My hosting service is Positive Internet. I have to say that I have always been really really pleased with their level of service—very knowledgeable Linux tech support people, rapid (less than three hours) response to queries and problems, etc. They are also very cheap. An example of their general service: I needed the subversion client tools installed so I could sync some stuff on the site with my subversion repository and they installed them within 15 minutes of my asking them to. That’s pretty impressive.
So, yes, this is the first time they’ve let me down. But I can’t help feeling that this is a pretty big let down. I just assumed that they backed up user directories nightly. I’m astonished that they don’t seem to back them up at all.
May 5th, 2005 at 12:10 pm
Sadly, I’m not surprised. There is a big gap in the hosting market between cheap, mass market services and expensive, bespoke ones. I frequently see small businesses running critical applications on consumer-grade services that cost next to nothing (and so provide next to nothing). I thought Positive Internet were one of the few that existed in this gulf, and while they do have some of the hallmarks of a quality outfit (good support being one), they seem to be guilty of the worst crime among the mass market outfits, that of not protecting your data.K