It's been quite the week for this little site of mine. On Thursday, the company that was hosting this site suddenly realized I had blown past my bandwidth allotment for August. The thing is, I had exceeded my limit back on August 14. I just assumed it was a very soft cap and nobody was paying attention. On August 31, they locked down this site until I forked over more cash for a bigger plan. In my brilliance, I decided to leave the site down for the remainder of Thursday knowing that Friday wasn't just another day, but another month.
On Friday the site was back, but there was a sporadic outage. Something about the account being moved to a different server and DNS changes having to propagate. Of course, there was no warning.
On Saturday I awoke, had access to my site, and backed up the Movable Type database. I threw up Homer's Quote of the Week, as I do every Saturday morning, and noticed I was just about out of space on my hosting plan. I had a few MBs left. This was the weekend for Plan B. Then, I lost access to this site completely, as well as a few other sites I maintain on the same server. According to my real-time stats, people were visiting. A quick chat with my brother, my mom and a friend confirmed they could all see the site. For me, however, the connection timed out. I ran a tracert for the domain, saw it stall at the first stage and blamed my ISP for what I perceived to be a DNS or Routing issue. Three calls to Rogers later, a million trouble shooting checks and a reboot of the modem and I still couldn't access my own site. Everyone else could, only I was in the dark. Eventually I did something that would change my IP address and suddenly I was in like Flint. The company hosting my site blocked my IP address from accessing the server that was hosting sites I own and maintain. I immediately updated the DNS name servers for torontomike.com and kicked off plan B.
Plan B was essentially me moving this sucker over to my friend's server. The price was perfect. At my new home I installed and configured Movable Type, installed the database back up I had grabbed that morning and waited for DNS propagation. I went to bed Saturday night with the assumption all would be back to normal Sunday. I was wrong.
Sunday was pasta sauce canning day. We spent the entire day at my moms canning tomatoes. Check out the pics! Periodically, I'd check out the site to see if it was pointing at its new home. I was assured the transition would be seamless. Around 10am, torontomike.com began resolving at its new home, but the results weren't what I was expecting. The site couldn't be found. I threw my bud an email explaining what I had done and where we were at. I went to bed Sunday night still waiting for a reply.
Here we are on Labour Day Monday and all is well. My helpful friend missed a configuration step on his end, which explains yesterday's outage. I spent this morning getting the forms working again, installing the FlickrPhoto plugin, and rebuilding everything. All seems well.
If you're still with me, rest assured things have stabalized. Humble Howard fans will be happy to find http://www.torontomike.com/2006/07/humble_howard_are_you_okay.html back online, family will be happy to see I finally updated the pictures page, Simpsons fans can get their Homer quote fix and celebrity death watchers will be shocked to learn of The Crocodile Hunter's demise. Now I have an entry to write while the CNE is still open.
Six hours of uninterrupted up time. Sweet.
