Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Massive downtime caused by expired domains

CEO of XeSolutions Sean Frank indicated that the reason for RAF being down was nothing more than miscommunication. The name servers, or computers that point you to the respective host that RAF is on, apparently expired. The members of staff at the company were not informed, which led to the extended day downtime, which lasted from Thursday December 18 to Sunday December 21.

So in light of this situation I have vowed to prevent this type of downtime from occurring again; if downtime does occur (which is unavoidable), it happens smoothly. I don't want to bore you with server and domain talk, but let's just say that steps are being taken to prevent a complete loss of RAF for such a long period. Chief among the improvements is the acquiring of another host (bringing our total hosts to 3), this more expensive and expansive host will provide us with redundancy. If our main host (who admittedly was performed well prior to this month) XEhost dies on us again, there will be a full usable backup available for me to use, and point you guys to.

Talking about backups, prior to this event I only backed up the forum's database on my hard-drive; now I will begin backing up the entire website (over 4 gigabytes of data) on external devices each week. This copy of RAF will be uploaded to our newly acquired secondary host.

Let's just hope we don't run into more problems. But if we do, we should be better prepared this time around.

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