Watch out for database failures
by Sapphire (May 5, 2005)
You may be familiar with the hair-ripping agony I have experienced at the hands of disappointing web hosts. Most recently, a former host for one of my other sites had what I thought was a cpanel glitch preventing my sites from accessing their databases. Turned out it was even worse than I thought, but the good news is, I think I found a great new host.
When the new host tried to transfer my site for me (which they do for free), they were unable to access the databses because of that Cpanel glitch on the old host. I emailed them the backups I’d created, and it turned out those were corrupted. Yikes! Guess what your heart does when you hear that your backups are corrupted? Apparently, the old host had something screwy in their configuration or something, and this issue had both caused the database crash and caused the backups to contain errors.
The new host and I went back and forth in emails over a 24 hour period (when these guys say 24/7 support, they mean it), and in the end, offered to repair the corrupted databases for a small fee. This required a lot of work on their part, and I think many hosts would have just left me to fend for myself. And that would have meant rebuilding the site from scratch - and with a blog, that means you never quite get it back the way it was. Nightmare.
Even though this turned out pretty well for me, I lost two days on my site. And it could have been a lot worse. I thought because I had an auto script backing up my databases, I was safe. I should have known better, and hopefully, you will learn from my mistake.
Back when my site had only one database, that database crashed on the old host. I went into Cpanel > MySql and repaired the database from there. All appeared to be well. Until this next database crash that took out both databases, and caused all my backups going back over several weeks to be corrupted. My guess is, there was a little something wrong with the hosts’ database configuration all along, but not enough to prevent it from working at first. Whatever was wrong must have caused more and more errors as time went by, until finally it just wasn’t fixable anymore, except by a qualified database technician. Obviously, you don’t want your sites running on a database that needs to be taken to a mechanic every few weeks. This site is only a couple of months old - what if I’d left it on that host for another 6 months? My guess is, even the database tech wouldn’t have been able to fix it.
When you’re not a tech specialist, it’s hard to guess whether a screw-up is something you did, something your host did, or something your software did. In my case, I missed all the signs. The first time I had a crash, my blog software programmer told me there might be something wrong with my host. But I thought maybe I’d misconfigured something somewhere. Apparently not.
Had I switched hosts back then, which I thought about doing, I’d have saved myself this huge stressful hassle. Hopefully, this story will save someone else a big headache.
Posted in Development & Design
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