On the Recent Move ...
So, things didn't go as smoothly as we would have liked. A few things coincided that led to a perfect storm of frustration here on the Sift. Here's the full story.
We were unhappy with our current hosting provider- we have 4 boxes with them that have recently been struggling with load- mostly database issues. The amount of ram in the DB server was half of what we were supposedly paying for – support was sluggish and we were getting pissed. Our good buddies at Neatorama just switched to a new bunch of servers that seemed like a heck of a deal. The move was on.
We needed to time the move to these new, much more powerful servers so that we weren't being double invoiced from two hosting companies. Our monthly server bill is a 4 figure amount that we just can't afford to double-pay.
So we paid for the first month on the new servers and they started building them- they had delays in getting the hardware- which was pushing right up on our invoice date of the 13th for the old servers- they finished building 2 days before the invoice date and Lucky had to pull an all-weekend job to transfer everything over to the new environment.
Still, everything would have been fine if it wasn't for our VideoSift domain hosted with Yahoo Small Business Hosting. When I first registered VideoSift on a lark back in 2006- they were offering $3 domains - and I thought - yes, this is for me. (unemployed at the time) They are a really, really bad service. Their interface appears to date back to the 1990s era web- and is very inflexible. I considered moving the domain onto a more modern registrar- but I was scared to touch it. I had read horror stories of domains being down for weeks on transfers from Yahoo- and had the experience of them just dropping our domain once for 72 hours on a whim. It pretty much works on Yahoo - and I didn't want to touch it.
In hindsight- this was the wrong attitude. The domain name server in the Yahoo control panel had our old server IP addresses in it. We needed to update this to the IP range for our new servers. We figured that this would propagate through in a few hours and people would seamlessly be directed to the new boxes. Unfortunately that was not the case. Yahoo hosting has a TTL "Time to Live" setting on DNS changes of 1 week - and there appears to be no way to modify this value. Even now, 5 days after the move- around 20% of our traffic is being directed to the old server - which has been shut down.
So, there you have it. Amateur hour on the Sift. I've learned my lesson and will move the VideoSift domain to a more reliable host. I'm sorry again for all the disruption. On the bright side- the new servers are great! We have a lot more free memory which we're planning to use to make the site even faster than it already is.
11 Comments
videosiftbannedmeSo, there you have it. Amateur hour on the Sift.
Sounds more like amateur hour at Yahoo. Do they not have anyone there who can setup a proper DNS server? I mean it's not that hard...
My hat's off to you fellows though. Thanks for the hard work!!
burdturglerThe good news is, nothing broke.
I think we were all having flashbacks of the Siftpocolypse when the site wasn't 100% after so long.
KrupoI should send this post to my friend who's tangled up with a Yahoo... done.
Now a really good company would come out and apologize for the mess with someone going online... hello, anyone who cares?
gwiz665Everything works when you get here and there are ways around the DNS snafu. While the transition wasn't as smooth as we could have hoped, it certainly wasn't as bad as we could have feared. Hopefully, we'll be out of the woods by the weekend.
Cheers.
arvanaBe very careful about transferring domains -- I've heard horror stories too, not just about delays but about hijackings. In fact it happened to somebody I know, they transferred a domain and in the process lost ownership of it. There are all these bots that use split-second timing to grab a domain in between one registrar canceling it and the new one getting it. The people that do this create advertising pages to capitalize on the residual traffic. There is probably a legal process to get it back but it would be very expensive and time-consuming.
KrupoI see 5 comments, I click on comments, but I just get bumped down to the blank comments box. Let's see if postinga comment changes this.
Edit: hard refresh fixed *that*.
arvana - I know someone whose URL keeps getting intercepted when clicked through from Google Reader. I wonder if what you described affected them? Hmm.
ThrobbinThanks for the hard work.
MaxWilderI know things in the professional hosting realm don't work quite the same as on simple web servers, but wasn't there a way you could just have a single page forward people from the old ip to the new until full dns propagation? The old meta refresh trick? At any rate, I discovered google dns from this experience, and that seems cool.
dagComment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)
We could have forwarded, but the problem was that the old Server and IP was getting shut down completely, and also, as we use full URL's to all links - any links would constantly be going back to the old server first.
I switched to Google DNS too. It does seem really speedy to me.
>> ^MaxWilder:
I know things in the professional hosting realm don't work quite the same as on simple web servers, but wasn't there a way you could just have a single page forward people from the old ip to the new until full dns propagation? The old meta refresh trick? At any rate, I discovered google dns from this experience, and that seems cool.
rottenseedYahoo?! Dude, you guys should change to angelfire or geocities
SagemindI had my domain registered years ago. http://www.nickeldesign.com
A few years ago after renewing it for another 10 years, my server company went out of business and sold off all their hosting service to a new company. (apparently I have it for another 5 years!
I don't know who this company is, or what happened to my hosting account - It just went poof into mid air.
I paid for it - I own it - But that's where it ends - My site disappeared and I never received any notification. My payment was made to Network Solutions directly but I don't know enough about hosting to know where I go from here or what my rights are.
http://who.is/whois/nickeldesign.com/
Any incite anyone in the know might have would be great!!!!!!!!!
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