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Posts Tagged ‘Canaca.com’

19
Jan

Woohoo!

   Posted by: wtf_dragon    in Site News

When I was forced to switch hosting companies — moving away from Canaca over to MediaTemple — I thought I’d lost my most current version of Aiera’s file archives. Yes, I had backups, but as I have learned over the last few months, I allowed too much time to lapse between backups; there were some files that were, apparently, forever lost.

Today was almost one of those days.

It started with someone asking for me to restore the download for the Ultima 9 Freeform Savegame. Which I finally got around to, today. However, it turned out that the ZIP archive for the savegame was…how shall I say this?…corrupt.

And believe me, there is not another copy of this thing anywhere on the Internet that I (or, rather, Bing and Google) can find. Not good.

So on a whim, I scoured my Gmail archives, and found the IP address for my old hosting server. Hoping against hope, I opened up Filezilla and tried my old account credentials. And somehow (I know not how)…it worked!

Seriously…it was like Christmas, the sequel.

I’m not sure, but I think I might just have everything back. I still have to check, but I’ve got a good feeling about this.

Update: the one file I was missing and feared to be lost — the download for Ultima Underworld for Dungeon Keeper — was among the recovered files. YES!

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26
Nov

Back online…kinda…

   Posted by: wtf_dragon    in Site News

Okay, the site has been restored to working order, at least as far as posting news and whatnot is concerned. However, because things at this end have proven busier than expected (new fathers and those who are still fathers, but no longer “new” fathers, will hopefully be able to sympathize), I have yet to restore the downloads to the web.

Also, the gallery also remains offline for the moment, although I should have that ready to go in short order. The gallery works again. It was just a matter of a quick database configuration change.

Anyhow, yes…downloads. Downloads are broken, and will remain broken for a bit still, because I not only have to re-upload about 6.3 GB of files, but I also have to then go through and check each project and utility entry to make sure that a) the correct downloads are linked to each entry, and b) that each entry has the most current downloads available for…y’know, whatever it is the entry is concerned with.

Which could take a while.

If someone wants to step in and help out, that’d be great; I can provide a tutorial on what to do and how to do it. I should have everything here back up and running within two weeks, but an extra set of hands might make it easier to cut that time down a bit.

As to what happened: I was hosted through Canaca.com for years, and they were pretty good to me for the first little while. In the past few months, however, I’ve had a lot more traffic coming to my various websites, and their server just couldn’t handle the load.

Which is kind of sad, given that the load in question wasn’t that extreme — a few thousand visits per month.

But three times it happened: my sites caused the server to overload whilst attempting to serve up multiple simultaneous PHP scripts. And after the third strike, they punted me. They did graciously grant me port 21 access for a few days, and I evacuated most of the files (the rest, I have backups for) from the account. I then set up a new hosting plan with MediaTemple’s “(gs) Grid Service,” which (if I understand it correctly) mirrors my site over a handful of servers, and then uses load-balancing to manage traffic spikes.

Yeah, it costs a bit more…but hopefully it means “no more outages.”

Anyhow, it’s good to be back. I’ll keep working on the site, and things should be back to normal in a bit here.

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