Techno Blues: Sometimes technology just gets you down

I happen to run a little web site dedicated to Lupin III, and I am also working once again as a web developer. The latter finally brought out the itch I have had to overhaul the HTML on the Encyc to make it fully validated XHTML strict 1.0 and CSS. I started late Friday night and worked until roughly 10:45 this morning. Without warning, my SSH session warned me that the server was going down immediately. Hmm…

I have been having some issues with my web host regarding spam; I have been flooded with spam recently, and the mail server itself has been placed on SpamCop’s blacklist a few times. I was hoping that they were taking the server down to patch up any holes that might be causing this. After 20 - 30 minutes of downtime, the server was back up, and I continued working. It was not until I had finished updating a lot of database records that I discovered that all my work prior to the server shutdown was lost.

Apparently, my web host had to swap out the hard drive on the server and decided to do it without any warning to their customers. To top it off, they apparently decided not to backup the machine first. So, they restored what had to be a two to three day old backup. I needlessly spent hours having to redo a significant amount of database changes. Yes, I can hear you saying that I should have had my own database backups. I do have my own backups, but I only do personal backups once a week. I was under the (mistaken) impression that the host was performing daily backups.

Quite frankly, I am considering looking for a new web host provider. Between the lack of timely backups (two or three days old?! bad, bad, bad) and the spam issues, I am becoming more and more displeased with the level of service I am receiving. It is a shame too as they have been fantastic until the past month or two.

But, the site is back to where I wanted to be today. Only the music section has yet to be converted over to the new XHTML/CSS layout. While the rest has been, I want to go back and redo a lot of the layout for the content portions. Once that has been done, the music section will be taken care of; there are some non-XHTML items in there I need to think about how to get around. So, that gets done last.