11th July 2007 - "Black Saturday"
Posted: 11 Jul 2007, 15:15
<b>Recent Downtime</b>
The site is back up and running again after a rather dramatic problem that knocked out connections to the various databases the site uses. We’ve been calling it “Black Saturday”, and work has being going on constantly to get the site back up. If you’re interested the problem was not with either the web page or database servers but in a data centre in-between. Our web pages couldn't pull data from our databases. There was no way of quickly contacting this data centre (In Dallas, USA) to resolve the block (which can happen for lots of reasons) and so we needed to move quickly to a new platform with all parts of the site in one place.
To do this we’ve had to move all the WebPages (a total file size of 1.2GB, 8780 jpeg image files alone) and all four databases for the FAQ, Cat-eLog, Watermart and Forum sections (totalling 3,117,918 records) onto a brand new server on a new host platform and provider now based here in the UK.
There are several niggling issues with this new environment, but the main site has been up and running since 01:00 GMT 11th and I’ve just enabled the forum in the last hour.
Sorry for the downtime, believe me when I say I’m the last person in the world that wanted to have to put the site down and migrate it to a new home!
If you notice any problems, please post in the bugs & suggestions forum!
Jools
The site is back up and running again after a rather dramatic problem that knocked out connections to the various databases the site uses. We’ve been calling it “Black Saturday”, and work has being going on constantly to get the site back up. If you’re interested the problem was not with either the web page or database servers but in a data centre in-between. Our web pages couldn't pull data from our databases. There was no way of quickly contacting this data centre (In Dallas, USA) to resolve the block (which can happen for lots of reasons) and so we needed to move quickly to a new platform with all parts of the site in one place.
To do this we’ve had to move all the WebPages (a total file size of 1.2GB, 8780 jpeg image files alone) and all four databases for the FAQ, Cat-eLog, Watermart and Forum sections (totalling 3,117,918 records) onto a brand new server on a new host platform and provider now based here in the UK.
There are several niggling issues with this new environment, but the main site has been up and running since 01:00 GMT 11th and I’ve just enabled the forum in the last hour.
Sorry for the downtime, believe me when I say I’m the last person in the world that wanted to have to put the site down and migrate it to a new home!
If you notice any problems, please post in the bugs & suggestions forum!
Jools