Sincerest Apologies for the downtime over the last week. My hosting provider was doing migration of a bunch of websites from one server to another, and in this process they were upgrading MYSQL, Apache, plus a whole host of other stuff it seems. Now while they did a staggered migration of the websites, it all went wrong once a significant number of websites were on the new host. Access times went through the roof, sometimes taking over 2 minutes to load a single page.
This went on for several days, and I could not even get at the back end to retrieve backups, or get into the database to pull out the data so I could replicate on another provider. Luckily, last night, the provider’s back-end recovered briefly, enough for me to get in and pull all the files and a database backup. I then purchased a new hosting plan with another provider and uploaded the recovered files, replicating the website. What was most important was that all the links on the new site remain the same as the old one, as some blog articles are linked from hundreds of websites all over the world, and I didn’t want to break that. Luckily, testing of the new site went well, I was able to maintain the links, and I’ve finally updated the website domain www.davidhunt.ie to point at the new server.
If anyone notices anything broken with the new website, missing images, missing pages, please email me at daveh@climbing.ie (I can’t trust dave@davidhunt.ie for the moment).
Again apologies for the downtime, I believe that Digiweb have done an incredibly bad job of the migration, with very poor communication with the public on the status of the recovery. Unfortunately, my daily traffic has been decimated, and that’s something I’ll have to work hard to get back. I guess I just have to invent some new stuff to publish! 🙂