website backups
Posted by: Mekon on 04 September 2004
After crowing about how cheaply a phpBB could be hosted, my cheap hosting deal appears to have bitten me in the arse.
The server that hosts my board, website, and email went down last night. Lots of explanations that don't appear to tell the whole story, but basically, the last uncorrupted backup the host has is August 8th, and the last one I have is August 13th. Teach me for being slack. Worst of all, I've been using a private forum on my board to collaborate on a research project, and the collaborator and I don't have copies of the stuff we came up with.
It's taught me a major lesson; don't rely on other people's backups.
Posted on: 04 September 2004 by Roy T
Data only exists if held in at least two places both of which are under your complete control.
I feel you loss (of data).
Posted on: 05 September 2004 by woody
Who was the hosting provider?
-- woody
Posted on: 05 September 2004 by Mekon
www.flexihostings.net, via a reseller. The reseller has been great, and is doing everything he can, as well as offering to refund and assist moves to other hosts, or to give 4 month extensions to the deals we've got. He is as gutted as I am.
It did look like everything but the MySQL databases were there, and I have a two week old tar of the site. However, they've done something this morning, and I can not longer login to the control panel.
Posted on: 06 September 2004 by woody
Are you in education sector? If so doesn't your institution provide hosting/collaborative services?
-- woody
Posted on: 06 September 2004 by Mekon
Yep, currently a PhD student, starting as a research fellow in October. Uni only provides webspace. You don't get PHP or MySQL, which severely restricts its value to me, so it was easier to get my own host. As a consequence, despite being in a uni with Russell Group aspirations, in terms of research, it's like the internet never happened.
Posted on: 06 September 2004 by matthewr
My host offers everything for virtually no money. I assume their business model requires most customers who claim to want TBs of storage and GBs of bandwidth don't really. And that if anyone actually tried to do what they claim is possible, your site would just crash and they would just give you your money back and shrug.
"it's like the internet never happened"
I was talking to someone at the weekend who as telling me that the Daily Telegraph basically doesn't have desktop Internet access for the vast majority of it's journalists. No 'net access on a national newspaper just defies belief.
Matthew
Posted on: 06 September 2004 by Top Cat
Kinda like locking the barn door after the horse has bolted, but you should really take responsibility for your own backups. By all means use their service as well (for extra peace of mind) but at least a weekly dump of your database zipped and ftp'd off the box, plus a periodical zip of your website (taken each time something has been changed) and keep it safe.
John
Posted on: 06 September 2004 by Mekon
I am paying £30 a year (should have been £40) for
100MB Disk Space
2GB Monthly Transfer
50 Email Accounts
Catch All Email
1 Click Installer with 46 pre-installed scripts
25 MySQL Databases
CGI, PHP
Control Panel
Which seemed ok at the time. Could I have done a lot better at that sort of price? Obviously, getting a reseller package would've been way cheaper, but at the time, I couldn't be bothered to round up a bunch of people to go in with me.
Posted on: 06 September 2004 by Top Cat
Off topic, but if we're talking money...
I'm paying £100/month for co-hosting, and another £100-ish a month for a fully loaded RAID dual Xeon server. Based on mainly textual pages and an average monthly pages served count of ~150,000, I rarely average more than 3Gb in any given month. Site is run with SQL Server RDBMS and ASP, no email and a real sense of 'all your eggs in one basket'...
John
Posted on: 07 September 2004 by TomK
Sadly the computing world is full of cowboys who have easy access to technology undreamed of a few years ago, and who view it as a way to make an easy buck. I see sloppy and downright back practice everywhere I go (not in my establishement I hasten to add!).
On the other hand you pays your money and you takes your choice. What else can you buy for 30 quid a year?
