Monarchs Glen

Earlier today I decided to upgrade the Plesk software that manages my webserver. I used the built in 'update' button but something unexpected went wrong with severe consequences for the server.

There is no way to reverse what's happened without rebuilding the server, there's simply too much that's dead. For some lucky reason, the webserver, databases and DNS seem to have survived the destruction, so 'for now' we're still up and running.

Whatever happens at this point there WILL be downtime. The backup that I took just before the reset failed, however, assuming I backup the databases that are still running, I could restore us from an old backup reasonably quickly. The problem is that the fact this happened, means that I can never update the server software for fear of a repeat, and that's a ticking timebomb.

I think that I'm most likely to change webhost, there have always been a few issues with this server and I've found an alternative that offer me pretty much the same deal. However I get to move away from Plesk (which just went horribly wrong) and use CPanel instead.

DNS resolution is the main thing that's going to be an issue. Because DNS was previously managed by Plesk, I'm not sure that I can risk making changes manually. That means that when we move to another server, there is likely to be 24 to 48 hours where you may end up being sent to the old server.

Play your kingdoms, and hopefully it'll all work out ok. But I think that this current age wont count, so feel free to go a little crazy if you want. I'll reset again after we've been on the new server a couple of days.

Well then! thanks for the heads-up and if I can be of help somehow (helping input the code chunks when we move or whatever is needed) let me know. Moving to cpanel mean the backend is now linux or was it before anyway? (curious) are you able to copy/transfer things via ftp in this case?
Either way, I can help if ya need another set of typing fingers.


We can go a little crazy you say?
Can you make it so we can hit our own faith in bloodbath till we crash completely? lol

Well, the danger period has passed and we're still up. That means that the DNS is still functioning so there is less danger of the site vanishing.

I've purchased a new server and and starting to get it set up. However, as we don't seem to have the ticking DNS bomb that I feared, I'll do the migration a little slower and hopefully I'll be able to reduce the downtime to pretty much nothing. Essentially what I'm going to do is swap the DNS services to the new server, but initially have them point back to the current server. I'll set a short cache time, so in a few days everyone's ISP ought to be double-checking the DNS server every hour.

Basically this means that when I throw the switch, everyone ought to be on the new server within the hour, rather than the two days (or more) that I feared would end up being the case.

I know I said feel free to play as it this age wasn't going to count, but it looks like it might after all