New Server Move

Doug D.

Administrator
Staff member
Sometime between now and Monday, January 16th, the website, including the forum, will be offline, hopefully briefly. Some of you may have experienced the site not responding or responding with "access forbidden" messages both last week and at some point back in mid-November.

The domain registrar is also the company whose webhosting this site uses. The company was sold last year, and has since been in the process of migrating both its domain registration system and its webhosting business to a new platform. The migration process has not been without issues. In November the domain registrations for this and several others I own were migrated. In the process, settings integral to the site functioning on the internet were arbitrarily and improperly set by the registrar to defaults. As a result, some websites were down for days until the problem was identified and corrected.

As the deadline grew closer, the domain registrar last week again, for reasons not apparent, flipped those same settings back to the (non-functioning) defaults. Fortunately, the registrar sent me an email confirming "my" change request had been completed.

In the mean time, I was also enlightened as to what the looming webhosting migration deadline would mean. I was relieved to find that a migration to a new server platform had without my knowledge actually taken place on 12/29. Had I not learned this before Monday next, however, it would have possibly meant that any registrations or posts between 12/29 and then would be lost. That has thankfully been avoided.

In 2015, some of you may remember the issue with the server IP being identified as a spam source and as a result being placed on several anti-spam blacklist databases. A similar server move was effected at that time in order to try to remedy the problem. If anything was good about that move, it's that it gave quite a bit of insight into the ins and outs of such a process.

So, depending largely on how quickly the domain nameserver for your ISP is updated with the new server info, you may experience website and forum outage for as little as a few hours up to a day or more. Unfortunately, there is no control over or "express service" for such a process.

For the forum, you will see a message stating the forum has been turned off. When the new server begins to respond for your location, it will be already set to on, ready to resume.

My plan is to proceed with the process at a time as convenient for both me and the users of the forum as possible. Most likely some time on Saturday.
 
Re: Server Move

Thanks for the heads up. A friend of mine that deals with a cloud service has shared many similar stories with me...hope all goes well this weekend.
 
Re: Server Move

Last time the big problem was a limitation on how big a database could be imported in one transfer. The DB here had to be chunked into 4 or 5 parts, a real pain. I control the server now, so I have the power to tweak such settings as needed.
 
Re: Server Move

The domain registrar again today altered my domain nameserver settings without my authorization. Fighting the incompetence is futile. As a result the server move will take place sometime later today.
 
We'll have to see how this goes. This older vBulletin software has some minor incompatibility with a part of the new webserver. I'll give it 24 hours to see what transpires, if anything.
 
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