Sunday, December 02, 2007
12:02 by FoxTwo
Business Continuity - Yet another common term heard in companies and businesses.
Businesses can not afford downtime to their IT systems. Neither can you, if you're blogging for money (I hate the term "ProBlogger". Makes it seem like the opposite of this is "Anti-Blogger").
Last night as I was finishing up the previous entry, my webhost went down due to some Denial Of Service Attacks, or commonly known as DDoS attacks. Although my site wasn't the target, the server that it was hosted on, had hosted other websites, and probably one of them was the intended target.
It wasn't technically a "disaster", but it irritated the heck out of me. So, I did what I could - I set up a mirror site on another host, and pointed my domain to the alternate site until my original webhost recovered.
I was just chatting with themuxicbox on MSN and happened to mention what happened, and she said if it had happened to her she would not know what to do and would fret. So I thought I'd write this post and perhaps give the rest of you some idea of what to do.
First, you need to hunt for a backup webhost. Since my webhosts are all those "free webhosts", it's easy to sign up with them. Google is your friend, and you can find a lot of free webhosts. Your backup webhost might not necessarily need everything your main webhost does, but it'll be good if both of them offer almost the same things. Then, the backup webhost becomes a "mirror" of your original.
Yes, this blog, and my homepage, is hosted on a FREE webhost called 110mb.com. It has everything I need, and Blogger.com platform doesn't need MySQL so it doesn't bother me. If I ever switch to Wordpress, I would probably not need to move it from here since I could easily sign up with one of the free database sites out there and point my Wordpress blog to it.
Second, once you've found your backup webhosts, you need to upload your site (or blog) to it, keeping all the directory structures intact and in the same exact place, so that all your webpages and blog entries won't "cock up" and barf if a picture is not found, or have broken links etc.
Yes, once I completed this step I had to go back to Blogger.com and reconfigure my blog for the new webhost, ie change FTP servers, and then did a "Republish Entire Blog" from there. Took about 8 mins for Blogger to completely upload my entire history of postings from 2001 to present :)
Third, and last step - point your DNS to your backup webhost. Change your A records to the IP address of your backup webhost, so that visitors land on the new webhost instead of your original (which is currently down, remember?).
The problem with my method of "disaster recovery" is that, Wordpress blogs might not be able to execute this successfully. Why?
Because the majority of Wordpress blogs have their database on the SAME SERVER. If it's already down, the blog posts are down too, and having a backup site with an empty database is pointless. This only works if your database is OFFSITE or is on a platform where it does NOT require a database (like Blogger.com).
Another problem is that if you do NOT have your own domain, you can't execute step 3 above. You have no DNS entries to configure, so this wouldn't work for you too. Same problem occurs too even for Blogger.com blogs, if you are hosting your blog on Blogger's servers but only using a domain name for it. If xxxx.blogspot.com is down, it's down. Your domain entry is only pointing back to blogspot.com (like my http://loser.foxtwo.org blog). You need to have Blogger.com publishing to an external site via FTP for this to work.
Also, I doubt most people would do this since it's too "hardcore" as themuxicbox said :) But, for those of you who are geeky enough, this post is for you!
12:02 by FoxTwo
What Do You Do When Your Website Goes Down?
Business Continuity - Yet another common term heard in companies and businesses.
Businesses can not afford downtime to their IT systems. Neither can you, if you're blogging for money (I hate the term "ProBlogger". Makes it seem like the opposite of this is "Anti-Blogger").
Last night as I was finishing up the previous entry, my webhost went down due to some Denial Of Service Attacks, or commonly known as DDoS attacks. Although my site wasn't the target, the server that it was hosted on, had hosted other websites, and probably one of them was the intended target.
It wasn't technically a "disaster", but it irritated the heck out of me. So, I did what I could - I set up a mirror site on another host, and pointed my domain to the alternate site until my original webhost recovered.
I was just chatting with themuxicbox on MSN and happened to mention what happened, and she said if it had happened to her she would not know what to do and would fret. So I thought I'd write this post and perhaps give the rest of you some idea of what to do.
First, you need to hunt for a backup webhost. Since my webhosts are all those "free webhosts", it's easy to sign up with them. Google is your friend, and you can find a lot of free webhosts. Your backup webhost might not necessarily need everything your main webhost does, but it'll be good if both of them offer almost the same things. Then, the backup webhost becomes a "mirror" of your original.
Yes, this blog, and my homepage, is hosted on a FREE webhost called 110mb.com. It has everything I need, and Blogger.com platform doesn't need MySQL so it doesn't bother me. If I ever switch to Wordpress, I would probably not need to move it from here since I could easily sign up with one of the free database sites out there and point my Wordpress blog to it.
Second, once you've found your backup webhosts, you need to upload your site (or blog) to it, keeping all the directory structures intact and in the same exact place, so that all your webpages and blog entries won't "cock up" and barf if a picture is not found, or have broken links etc.
Yes, once I completed this step I had to go back to Blogger.com and reconfigure my blog for the new webhost, ie change FTP servers, and then did a "Republish Entire Blog" from there. Took about 8 mins for Blogger to completely upload my entire history of postings from 2001 to present :)
Third, and last step - point your DNS to your backup webhost. Change your A records to the IP address of your backup webhost, so that visitors land on the new webhost instead of your original (which is currently down, remember?).
Caveat
The problem with my method of "disaster recovery" is that, Wordpress blogs might not be able to execute this successfully. Why?
Because the majority of Wordpress blogs have their database on the SAME SERVER. If it's already down, the blog posts are down too, and having a backup site with an empty database is pointless. This only works if your database is OFFSITE or is on a platform where it does NOT require a database (like Blogger.com).
Another problem is that if you do NOT have your own domain, you can't execute step 3 above. You have no DNS entries to configure, so this wouldn't work for you too. Same problem occurs too even for Blogger.com blogs, if you are hosting your blog on Blogger's servers but only using a domain name for it. If xxxx.blogspot.com is down, it's down. Your domain entry is only pointing back to blogspot.com (like my http://loser.foxtwo.org blog). You need to have Blogger.com publishing to an external site via FTP for this to work.
Also, I doubt most people would do this since it's too "hardcore" as themuxicbox said :) But, for those of you who are geeky enough, this post is for you!
Labels: disaster recovery, internet, webhost, website
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tHemUxIcboX @ Saturday, December 08, 2007 12:07:00 AM no worry's I can always divert it to Fox2.com kekeke
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FoxTwo @ Saturday, December 08, 2007 4:08:00 PM
Hahaah fox2.com doesn't exist, and foxtwo.com is parked :)
MUAHAHAHAH!
