Server Migration (Tentatively scheduled for 11/12)

[mith]

Howdy all,

I am still working on our hosting provider to get some definitive answers regarding this weekend's downtime. It seems likely that our server was rebooted in recovery mode to diagnose a non-critical issue (regarding cPanel access - I noticed a problem there when I was working on getting a information page up for the cards we recently shipped). I did not schedule this, and I have also not received confirmation that this is why the server went down, but I doubt the timing is just a coincidence.

This is the third significant downtime we have experienced with this host, all in 2016. We were told that there may be an issue with the specific datacenter where our server is located, and they have offered to help us migrate to their main datacenter. We are considering that option, as well as the possibility of moving to a different hosting provider (possibly cloud based, which would potentially enable us to react more quickly to issues like this and fix them ourselves, and should also be more cost effective). Either way, there will likely be another downtime involved when we do migrate. I will post updates here when I have more information.

As always, when mafiascum is unavailable we have the "fallout shelter" forum on my personal server, located at pnewman.net/shelter. Kison has suggested configuring our DNS to point shelter.mafiascum.net there as well, which I will look into doing soon.

[mith]

Ok, I got some details on the issue. It seems the cPanel access issue was a symptom, and the downtime was (probably) only a matter of time.

In the short term, we are going to be moving to a different server with the same host. I'll try to give everyone some warning before we go down for that, but bookmark the fallout shelter (pnewman.net/shelter) as I'll be posting updates there while we migrate. In the medium term, we will still be looking at moving to a new provider.

[mith]

The new server is provisioned; we will be setting it up this week and likely migrating this weekend sometime.

[mith]

Migration is tentatively planned for tomorrow evening; Kison says the migration itself will take 1-2 hours. The server is already set up (with a two week old backup), so the time consuming part will be the transfer itself. DNS propagation may take a little more time, but we should be able to put up a redirect on this server during the transition.

[mith]

Domain should now be pointing to the new server, propagation can take 24-48 hours (but is usually faster than that for most people). Assuming there are no problems I will be letting our host know they can shut down the old server on Monday.