Forcibly changed servers; data loss!
Let’s keep things short as I have lots of things to do. On 30th November, this website was working functional as it had always been since April 2011. Then suddenly, in the morning of 1st December, the server had been reloaded.
At first I thought it was because someone with admin powers at cheapvps.co.uk, the provider of my previous server that hosted this website, reloaded the VPS. But after some searches, I ended concluding the VPS, which luis123456 had given to me in April 2011, was still owned by someone else – and that someone was trying to make use of the VPS.
I found the email of the real VPS owner (in fact, I used it for logging in to the VPS control panel, but I always had thought it was just some random address, because it only had two letters and five numbers!). I sent an email to that address, and some hours ago, I got a reply from David W. – the real owner of my previous gbl08ma.com server, to which I called “hydrogen”. So what happened in fact? According to David, he told luis123456 to “maintain” (and no more than that) the VPS. luis123456, whose real name is Luis A. (so we talk about real names here) was not authorized, to use the VPS. Still, (and I repeat, this is the saying of David), Luis gave me the VPS. Luis never said anything about this: I thought the VPS was some kind of sponsored VPS which the sponsor forgot about.
So, the old server was reloaded. But things were worse for my side: I was supposed to have an automated backup system, but it was broken and I had no time to fix it. Shortening: I have no backups of the old server, except Google cache, which didn’t cache one or two blog posts. Apart from the text of the posts, cached by Google, I lost everything on the server, that is, all files, images, configuration files, scripts, WordPress plugins, themes… hosted within the server. This also includes the few Anti-Aliased fonts for Rockbox, which I’ll have to upload again some day.
I just finished restoring all the blog posts I could. I’m still wondering how to restore comments done by other users on the various posts. But wait, I missed one part, right? How did I get this new server?
Indeed, this is a new server. I say the website keeps being the same only because the matter and intention of it keeps being the same, but in technical terms, this is a whole new WordPress install, on a whole new server. While this has some advantages, it also has lots of disadvantages – you can compare this to formatting a dog slow Windows computer, without making backups first: after re-installing the operating system, you get a clean system but most of your data, configuration and software is lost.
This new server was given by Humza Bobat, Infinity at freevps.us. So yes, now I have two server provided by freeVPS.us; since I know other users will get angry with me by having the admins of freeVPS opening an exception of the one-vps-per-user rule, I must provide some good argument to it.
In fact, I need two server for various reasons. One of the reasons, is that since the virtual servers I own are not very powerful (they are low-end boxes), they can barely handle two websites on the same server – note that we are talking about WordPress on this website, and while WordPress can run on fairly modest setups, I want some speed both for me and for the sometimes 10 concurrent users of the websites (it happens, for example when my stories get featured on Slashdot).
The multiple virtual host configurations, while they work well if you never touch the configuration files, are harder to maintain, in my opinion. But the main reason why having multiple servers is necessary is the following: being servers provided for free, you never know when one goes offline or you loose it forever (OMG! It just happened!). If one goes offline, you can still use the other for temporarily hosting an additional website or at least some informational page. Plus, you should never put all your eggs in one basket: the server that served gbl08ma.com went away with its data, but the situation could be worse if all the things were on it. If I had what I have on my “helium” server, the one that serves 4.l.to, on the server I lost, then I would have lost some hundreds of MB of information that is important (some of it even a bit confidential).
A interesting thing is, I have automated backups of the helium server working, although it gets much less visitors (not including short url clicks) than gbl08ma.com gets. The Murphy’s law regarding backups applies: even if you have backups of your things, they will never include what you just lost.
What about naming conventions? The “hydrogen” name now refers to this new server, while I’ll call the old one from on now “deuterium” 🙂 . The 4.l.to server keeps being called “helium”, as ever. I also have one testing server called “lithium”, but it isn’t used for anything permanent – as I said, it’s a test server.
If you have any questions regarding the data loss on this blog, please post on the comments. I’ll be busy for the next days/weeks/months trying to restore more of what was lost.