Server: Queen - Emergency Migrations

[Matt]

Dear Valued GlowHost Customer,

It has come to our attention that the Queen server has a high probability of primary harddisk failure in the near future. Some of you may have experienced intermittent slow loading sites, downtime or other anomalies during the last cope of weeks. All evidence points to a bad main drive.

We have 2 possible solutions in this case.

Plan A) The first possible method is to wait as long as possible until the main drive fails, then replace it with a new drive. When that happens all data including the operating system, all website files and databases can be lost, and usually are. When this option is chosen we then use our internal backups to restore everything on the new main drive.

The first problem with this scenario is that the backup data that is restored might be a little older than some people would like to see on their website's, because that backup is taken one time per day. In other words the site we would restore might be up to 24 hours old, which means any posts of other dynamic content might be lost. Also any changes to your PHP, HTML or other files that were recently uploaded would also be lost.

The second problem is there is downtime involved with turning the machine off, replacing the faulty hardware, reloading and reconfiguring the Operating system and control panel software, and restoring backups.

This method is generally only used in the situation where a primary harddrive simply fails without warning of any kind.

Plan B) The second plan is to migrate all accounts to a different server while the old server remains online. This lets us copy your website data in real time from the latest data possible available online, and in most cases is the most desirable solution because there is no downtime waiting for accounts to be restored.

The main problem seen in this scenario is that some of you may need to clear your DNS cache on your local computers because some of you may have settings, software, hardware or even an ISP that will try to send your browser to the old server until the built-in cache expires. In most cases you will be able to clear this cache on your own.

More information on how to clear your DNS cache can be found at the following URL:
http://forums.glowhost.com/knowledge...ache-1892.html

We will be choosing Plan B and we will be doing this sometime later this evening and hope to have the process complete early morning before the busy work week starts. Sunday is usually a good time to perform such work and we have determined from the data available to us that it is better to start the migration now than to gamble with a breakdown in the middle of the work-week or trying to wait until next weekend when we may find ourselves presented with "Plan A" as the only way to rectify the problem with the bad main drive on Queen.

Please follow progress of the transfer in this thread.

Support tickets regarding this issue will be redirected to this forum thread, so please do not open support tickets regarding this issue and feel free to ask any questions you may have here in the forum thread.

[sergey]

We have started the migration of accounts from the server Queen. We will keep you posted in this thread.

[Alexander]

All accounts have been transferred from the Queen server and pointed to the new server. Please, make sure that your domains use the following NS: ns27.glowhost.net and ns28.glowhost.net. This concerns all accounts which were hosted on server Queen except those few, who use private NS. Those clients were sent instructions to their emails.