Aaaaaand, we’re back!
Well, that was fun…
Here’s what happened to cause DPWR’s several-day downtime this month: I received an email from my web host informing me that they were going to be relocating their server center from Hopkinsville, KY to Columbus, OH sometime this month. Obviously, since this requires physical relocation of the hardware, the site would be offline for a day or two while that migration took place. When DPWR became non-responsive several days ago, I figured that was the problem, and let it be.
Now, to change gears, the DPWR.NET domain was registered back in 2002 when I signed up for a hosting plan with my former web host. At the time, I knew very little about the details of domain name management, and my host was never terribly good at informing me of things I needed to do to keep it (like, for example, that I needed to pay for it after the first year despite it being included as a free domain in my registration). Eventually, after getting fed up with the reliability and general incompetence of my former host, I migrated the site to a new host, but didn’t migrate the domain; I’d paid for it to be renewed for as many years as the contract allowed (which was 5) without bothering me about it, and managed to get the nameservers changed over to point to the correct web host.
This month, without any notification, my domain expired, and evidently reached the end of its renewal contract, because it wasn’t renewed. Only after some thorough investigation did I discover that my former web host was either bought out by or otherwise subsumed into a completely different company, which apparently has as many communication problems as the one it acquired. Fortunately, further investigation and semi-frantic calls to my current host revealed that both providers use the same registrar (tucows/OpenSRS) , and that transferring from one service provider to another on the same registrar is roughly a 30-minute process once the authorization goes through.
So, the short of it is that DPWR.NET is now managed through my current web host, which has proven to be considerably more reliable in telling me things that are relevant and/or important to me keeping my site up and running than my old host (in fact, over a year after I canceled my account with them, I was unceremoniously billed for over $100 in unpaid service fees… not exactly a reliable group, them…). Next March will proceed without incident, provided I’m not so destitute that I can’t keep the site running (highly unlikely at best). There will likely be one more period of downtime this month when the servers get relocated, but after that, it’ll be smooth sailing.
One last note, though, which I will be relaying to several other forums for the sake of keeping people informed… I will be making concerted efforts to improve the speed and efficiency of DPWR over the next however-long (ideally things will improve by the end of the month) by moving the database to a new SQL server within the host and clearing out as much of the cruft as I possibly can. DPWR’s file server works pretty well; it just takes forever for the SQL server to respond, and on a site as DB-reliant as DPWR, that creates some serious slow-downs. I’ll fiddle with it and see what I can do to make it faster, but no promises yet.
I have a ton of work to do on the site, and absolutely no time (or energy, lately) to get any of it done, it seems. I’ll try to make some improvements before the end of the month, but again, I can’t make any promises. I think my plate’s finally gotten over-filled, and programming 7-4 every day is doing very little to improve my attitude toward getting more programming done when I get home.