Hi there,

Well, we experienced a combination of things – some predictable, some not – that took our sites “Webmaster Resources and Information” (http://webmaster-resources.info), ”My Own Home Based Internet Business” (http://my-own-home-based-internet-business.webmaster-resources.info) along with the original version of “Green Home Mega Store” (http://greenhomemegastore.com) off line for almost a week.

As far as I can retrace what happened, it’s more or less the following:

• We host “Webmaster Resources” – a WordPress ver. 2.6.0. blog, “My Own Home Based Internet Business” – a php site, and the original version of “Green Home MegaStore” – also a WP ver. 2.6.1 blog on one of our hosts – DGNS – and we can’t complain about the hosting, the service has been good and we are receiving the first year’s hosting free as part of the benefits from joining a commercial membership website called All Teamed Up – ATU – the free hosting is again available, but there is also additional top-notch hosting for as little as US$ 1,49 per month for paid members.
• Our hosting provider relocated their server farm last weekend
• In the (potential) confusion, I ignored a “warning shot” from the websites that they were almost out of storage space – and then all heck broke loose!
• The account went over limit on storage (400 MB is a lot of space, but we busted the limit)! I didn’t believe it was possible, after all, we only had the three sites, and they were all-together a maximum of around 100 MB.
• Later, I simply was forced to believe it, because the websites went offline!

I still didn’t understand what happened until I went into the files with my ftp agent. Then, it slowly became clear what had transpired to chew up so much storage so fast.

• Remember, there were two WP blogs in the system, the Webmaster Resources blog and the original Green Home MegaStore blog. The GHMS blog was set up as a sub-domain of Webmaster Resources.
• Both WP blogs were set up to do full backups every week automatically (a nice little plug-in does all the work – set it and forget it).
• What I didn’t know or think about, is that the backup system on Webmaster Resources was not only backing up the Webmaster WP site, it was backing up everything there in the domain root directory, all the sub-domains included!
• Also, I had it set up to retain 14 backups – I thought that would be a little over two weeks’ worth, seven database partial backups plus one full backup weekly. Nope – that meant 14 database partial backups and 14 full backups! Woof!
• So, every week, I was adding one-third more material backed up by the Webmaster system! No wonder I ran out of storage!
• Look at it this way; the numbers in the table below are rough approximations, but even if they were off by 50%, I would still have been in trouble very soon, and the storage requirement would have stabilised at about 2,2 GB (!) :

.

• The real problems started when the capacity was overshot, many of the files in the WP files and elsewhere were erased. My backups were also in trouble. And the only one I had was from the second week of existence of the Webmaster blog – not much content at that time! I had not thought seriously about downloading backups, and at that time, I didn’t have the capacity to store them. Today, I do (bought a 1 TB external harddisk in February).
• My salvation was a system partial backup that DGNS has in their system as an automatic. It isn’t 100% complete, so I will still have to do some work to bring everything back to normal.

This gives me an opportunity to upgrade the blog to WP ver. 2.7.1, which I will do, and I will be all up-to-date within about a month.  But I will be busy!

The original Green Homes Mega Store site is gone – it is no longer necessary, since the new site is up and working well. The My Own Home Based Internet Business site will stay there – it remained essentially untouched through all this mayhem. 

There were bits and pieces of some other things there as well, and these are now gone, and the host account is cleaned up. My only concern is that the fantastico service seems to have been lost in the server farm relocation. That “one-click-installation” is a great feature!

Anyway…

Lessons to be learned here:

1. Always back up your files to your own harddisk (somewhere) in addition to the hosting service area – and remember, the WP automatic backups are stored in the same place where your files are! And do it on a schedule! Weekly is probably the most efficient factoring time against potential loss.
2. Make sure that if there is any “nesting” of WP sites, that the backup of the “highest” WP site excludes the lower blogs – that’s how to avoid the multiplier effect. The way to do that is to exclude the files from the sub-domains in the WP backup.
3. When it looks like you’re using up a lot of storage all of a sudden – look quick! Solve it before you hit a limit!

Ciao for now!

Craig

Jimmy Craig Websites