I found some time to kill so here's the story:
The previous web host utilized a piece of software which they offer to their customers to manage their servers. Unfortunately the software had a security exploit where it allowed a hacker the capability to delete the data from their customer's servers. The funny thing about it is the company which created the software released an update to fix the problem. They sent out mass emails and posted announcements on their website informing their customers (web hosts) about the update. The information was on the web for at least two days and the fix involved deleting just one file. After two days we went down along with a bunch of other sites because the previous web host failed to patch the hole in time.
Of course with my luck this all happened while I was in Las Vegas where I don't have a computer nor a secure Internet connection to work on the server. Fabulous I thought. I was practically powerless to do anything about it and could only hope that the previous web host would sort things out quickly. Boy was I wrong.
The first couple of days almost all of their servers were down because they were working on bringing everything back up with everyone's data restored. When that proved too time consuming, they brought almost everyone back online with new servers and they would handle data restores on a case-by-case basis. I said almost because there was still a significant amount of servers offline after a couple of days. When I asked to restore our data with their backup, they said our server wasn't configured in time to run automatic backups, even though they advertised free automatic backups and we've been a customer for over 2 months.
Now I always like to give people a chance especially considering the situation they were in. I can't imagine how many calls, servers, and requests they had to handle all at once. But nearly after a week of waiting for them to sort things out, I had enough. What drew the line was after a day of having our server back online and working on it to bring everything back up, it went down again for two days. And this was after they said everything is fine. So I quickly found another server through a different web host and its been online ever since...so far. Lesson learned.
Luckily I was able to get almost everything back up in time before I flew out to Curaçao, but I'd be lying if I said I felt comfortable with how things are. In the two occasions where I've flown out somewhere this year, the site has gone down. Last time when I was in Aruba it was my fault for not realizing it was time to move to a better server. Last week the web host failed to do their jobs properly. And now that I'm about to fly to Curaçao, who knows. Maybe someone trips over the Internet cord and the whole thing goes down. Yay bad luck.
I have to say it's been an experience and I'll be using the lessons I learned to prevent it from happening again. I can't thank you guys enough for understanding and putting up with all the shenanigans. I also want to give thanks to Harri Tervola for changing my flight to a later date the night before I was supposed to fly out so I could have more time to work on the website.
So what else happened while the site was down?
