10:02 by FoxTwo
Painless Website And Blog Migration
Some time back last year, I wrote about how to do "Disaster Recovery" on your website.
Today, I did exactly just that!
Well, don't worry, you probably didn't even notice it, because both sites were mirrored before I did the DNS change. For those people whose ISP have slower DNSes, they will still hold the old IP address to my old site. For those people who have already updated, will get the new site. In any case, the only difference is that the old site won't have this blog entry; the new one, ie this one, will.
Why did I change host?
Very recently, like a few days ago, I noticed that it took a very long time to access my website. Various tests showed that it wasn't my webhost, but more likely to be a Starhub problem. However, since I do get comments on my blog posts, I really hated to wait and wait for my site to load before I can reply their comments.
So, I went hunting for a new FREE host. Yes, I found a FREE host, within 30 seconds of Googling for one - 10GBFreehost.com. It offers 10GB space and 20GB monthly bandwidth. My current one offered only 5GB space, but 300GB monthly bandwidth. Since I doubt I will ever hit anywhere near even 5GB of bandwidth per month, the drastic reduction of "free bandwidth" isn't a problem.
Plus, this new host offers FREE MySQL databases, 5 of them in fact! Not only that, each database can be as large as 200MB. Now, 5 databases WOULD come in useful, should I ever decide to switch blogging platforms to one that require MySQL.
So, in the wee hours of this morning, I loaded up my trusty FTP program Filezilla, and started to mirror my existing site over to a new host. Migrating a Blogger platform blog is easy as pie actually. All I needed to do was to make sure every file that exists on my current server is transferred over to the new server in the same exact place. That means keeping all the files in the same directories, and recreating them on the new server the same way.
I didn't even need to touch any settings in Blogger.com itself, since I have already pointed it to "foxtwo.org" which is controlled by the DNS.
After the files were successfully transferred, the only thing left to do is to change the DNS to point to the new server. Sit back, relax, and wait for 72 hours for all DNS servers wolrdwide to update themselves with my new IP address. In the meantime, the old site still contains everything, so people that aren't updated will still get my old site and old contents.
If you're reading this entry, that means the DNS that you're using is already updated with my new webhost. See? It's transparent to you!
Labels: disaster recovery, internet, webhost, website
12:02 by FoxTwo
What Do You Do When Your Website Goes Down?
Business Continuity - Yet another common term heard in companies and businesses.
Businesses can not afford downtime to their IT systems. Neither can you, if you're blogging for money (I hate the term "ProBlogger". Makes it seem like the opposite of this is "Anti-Blogger").
Last night as I was finishing up the previous entry, my webhost went down due to some Denial Of Service Attacks, or commonly known as DDoS attacks. Although my site wasn't the target, the server that it was hosted on, had hosted other websites, and probably one of them was the intended target.
It wasn't technically a "disaster", but it irritated the heck out of me. So, I did what I could - I set up a mirror site on another host, and pointed my domain to the alternate site until my original webhost recovered.
I was just chatting with themuxicbox on MSN and happened to mention what happened, and she said if it had happened to her she would not know what to do and would fret. So I thought I'd write this post and perhaps give the rest of you some idea of what to do.
First, you need to hunt for a backup webhost. Since my webhosts are all those "free webhosts", it's easy to sign up with them. Google is your friend, and you can find a lot of free webhosts. Your backup webhost might not necessarily need everything your main webhost does, but it'll be good if both of them offer almost the same things. Then, the backup webhost becomes a "mirror" of your original.
Yes, this blog, and my homepage, is hosted on a FREE webhost called 110mb.com. It has everything I need, and Blogger.com platform doesn't need MySQL so it doesn't bother me. If I ever switch to Wordpress, I would probably not need to move it from here since I could easily sign up with one of the free database sites out there and point my Wordpress blog to it.
Second, once you've found your backup webhosts, you need to upload your site (or blog) to it, keeping all the directory structures intact and in the same exact place, so that all your webpages and blog entries won't "cock up" and barf if a picture is not found, or have broken links etc.
Yes, once I completed this step I had to go back to Blogger.com and reconfigure my blog for the new webhost, ie change FTP servers, and then did a "Republish Entire Blog" from there. Took about 8 mins for Blogger to completely upload my entire history of postings from 2001 to present :)
Third, and last step - point your DNS to your backup webhost. Change your A records to the IP address of your backup webhost, so that visitors land on the new webhost instead of your original (which is currently down, remember?).
Caveat
The problem with my method of "disaster recovery" is that, Wordpress blogs might not be able to execute this successfully. Why?
Because the majority of Wordpress blogs have their database on the SAME SERVER. If it's already down, the blog posts are down too, and having a backup site with an empty database is pointless. This only works if your database is OFFSITE or is on a platform where it does NOT require a database (like Blogger.com).
Another problem is that if you do NOT have your own domain, you can't execute step 3 above. You have no DNS entries to configure, so this wouldn't work for you too. Same problem occurs too even for Blogger.com blogs, if you are hosting your blog on Blogger's servers but only using a domain name for it. If xxxx.blogspot.com is down, it's down. Your domain entry is only pointing back to blogspot.com (like my http://loser.foxtwo.org blog). You need to have Blogger.com publishing to an external site via FTP for this to work.
Also, I doubt most people would do this since it's too "hardcore" as themuxicbox said :) But, for those of you who are geeky enough, this post is for you!
Labels: disaster recovery, internet, webhost, website
