Some of my web sites, including billso.com and billso.info, were down between 4 and 8 March 2009. Dreamhost moved my account to a new and faster server - but forgot to tell me about the move. When I checked my sites, I got error messages.
Dreamhost support admitted that they should have given my 72 hours prior notice, so I’d have time to do a complete backup and checkout on my sites. With some lead time, I probably could have had everything restored within an hour of the server migration. I love DH, so I’m not going to fault them because part of the problem is my own fracking fault.
I use a WordPress plugin called WordPress Database Backup to run a daily backup of each site’s MySQL tables, which hold the articles, pages and data for each site. Without those tables, there’s no blog.
When I restored billso.com, the entire site came back online - except for one feature. The RSS feed on billso.com wasn’t resolving at all. I checked Google for some tips, edited a couple of WordPress files and restored the RSS service.
I also discovered during the database restoration process that I hadn’t backed up all of the tables for one of the blogs. WordPress plugins sometimes set up their own tables to record information on posts, pages or users. On that one blog, I failed to include three tables in the scheduled daily backup.
I will restore billso.info this weekend. That server is an experimental lifestream which should aggregate my activities on several different services, including Twitter and FriendFeed.
