UBB.Developers Forums Community Development Programming Web Hosting Server upgrade with changing of paths and password

Hi!

While it was announced that there will be an upgrade with moving to other server,
within of 14 days,
only at friday ( 18 days later ) i got an email with new paths/passwords, inclusive "preview" URL.
Anyway they "forgot" to send me MySQL password (any info at all like name of DB )
Monday i got the answer to my email and MySQL info,
then ONE HOUR later the domain was linked to the new server,
and the old wansnt available anymore.

I think, i'm just in bad dream... how can it be possible ?
OK, i'm lucky, this was just my "backup" server,
i keep just in case something happens to the primery one,
so i can switch immediately to the other one.
But it i do one day, this one would become my primery server,
and i would make an upgrade probably too for more traffic ...

I imagine, if it would be my main server with forums,
and i would be in holidays in south somewhere,
or i buyed the tickets and arranged the vacation time with my firm
a month before this "upgrade" ?
My forums simply would be dead, exept i would give my email account
to someone, who would administrate the my site,
but as you see it seems to be even not easy,
since they "managed" to forget to send me MySQL info,
and there was only 3 days or less for all changes, just the WE,
monday in the morning the old server wasnt there anymore.

Then, what's with all the data ?
They did not annouced when they copy all the data !
Just informed after that, or a while after that, who know,
so to be sure that no posts are lost,
a manual copy would be needed,
which could be a lot of work with big forum.

My question is -
is it something, that can happen to you with every provider,
or this provider is just so bad ?
I'm really mad now, i still can not believe...
( this provider was recommended me by a friend,
and in half year there wasnt any problems... )

Sounds like a re-seller acct and their servers were switched on them. It happened to some other people I know, except they only had ~5% of their forum files transferred over - we had to make do with a backup I had from a couple weeks earlier.

Sorry about your troubles, one more good reason to find out more about your hosts and who actually owns/runs the servers.

Hi Allen !

Thank you.

But what makes me even more sad is -
they seems to make own decisions about servers,
probably even own them.
They simply say, they think it was the best decision
to upgrade, to change the hardware, and do it ASAP
( or even that users wanted to have it ASAP ),
and being a small firm they had not resources
for any other way of upgrade.
And they really mean it is not so bad, as i see it:
besides of emails with information they sent me
2 emails answering to each of my emails, discussing the upgrade behavior.

What i would really like to know is -
is there a garanty, that some special providers
would not do this ?
Am i right, that what they did ( even if they would not forget MySQL info first time )
is really bad ?
Or am i wrong ?
I think 3 days for fixing paths and no info
on exact day and time of data copying to new server,
is just inacceptable behavior,
since in many cases it would simply kill all dynamic content
( one can not baysit the site 365 days in year, holidays must be too ... )

Could it happen to me with provider like http://www.tera-byte.com for example ?

Other very sad thing for me is,
that they was one of rather few, who accepted the possible content of the site and forums,
i asked 6 German providers,
only 2 said "it's ok", 3 or 4 said "no"
May be i'll regret telling it, but here is
what at least parts of my site and at least one of my forums are:
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/2150/index.html
( this is not my site, just an example,
since my site is only in German yet,
and there is not more content then just a translation
of small part of a novel into German and my Forums )

Burns