503 - Service Temporarily Unavailable???

[Johnnie F.]

503 - Service Temporarily Unavailable: I've had it with this host now! We'll be moving to another host.

The move will probably not be possible without any inconveniences at all. The domain has to be directed to the new location, what might take a while to get known on the web. Then the database has to be backed up and read onto the new server. When it is finally switched over there might be a gap, i. e. posts made to the old location after the database has been backed up and moved. Those will be copied over manually then. What time it takes to get the domain directed to the new location cannot be foreseen. We'll see! 

[dirtydog]

Forum owners and free/cheap servers do not go together, you can spend your life looking for a combination like that that will work, doubt you will find it though

[Johnnie F.]

We'll be moving to a company I have an account with since more than three years. Honestly I didn't expect koratfart forum to turn into something useful that could make much fun. But it did! So it will follow the path of my good experience now.

[dirtydog]

When you change servers why not do a back up, up it to the new server and then redirect from here for a few hours for the dns to catch up.

[dirtydog]

here's a similar set up but for a different reason newscambodia.com do something similar to this and let it ride 24 hours before closing down on this one.

[Johnnie F.]

When you change servers why not do a back up, up it to the new server and then redirect from here for a few hours for the dns to catch up.

Good idea! But it won't display correctly or I have to change the urls for themes after uploading and again when the domain works directly.

I hope the internet is willing to let me back up in the morning. Out here in the sticks with EDGE only it is too slow for that now. And for reading it onto the new server I gotta wait for the people at the new host to work (- 5 hrs). After lunch (over here) they might do it.  Cannot do myself there because phpmyadmin doesn't allow more than 2048 KB files. So I upload via FTP onto a folder and they read it into the database. Had already a successful test  last week.

The change of direction shouldn't take so very long, because I'm not changing name servers, just A-records. But you never know the internet.

[dirtydog]

Cannot do myself there because phpmyadmin doesn't allow more than 2048 KB files.

You need to change that, forums only get bigger so you need server to server transfer, we host over 100 domains, the main one is about 30gb, aint no way we can down and up all that, think last time we changed states we had 15 minutes downtime, ie back up on the first server for protection against corruption and transfer and everything else, downtime 15 minutes. 100mb to 100mb is pretty quick, think we mirrored the site from the old server initially to get the dns correct with the database running from the new server, ie same urls, not different urls.

[Johnnie F.]

The transfer isn't aproblem. FTP (I use filezilla) doesn't have a size limit. Inserting into the database is the problem. Until now I've seen hostsonly  provide phpMyAdmin for database access. And that is limited to ridiculous 2048 KB.

Even open source software now tends to have build-in backup and restore functions. This release candidate of SMF we're running does have a backup but not a restore function yet to my knowledge.

Server to server transfer of course reduces downtime and gaps at moves. But how often does one move?

[Johnnie F.]

We're over! Just a lot of adjustments still need to be made - after I found out how! 

[george]

Glad this aint the BBC

[Johnnie F.]

I noticed the old cookies don't work anymore. Delete them from your browser and the board will please you with new and working ones.

[george]

Never noticed, use too many browsers and proxies for it to affect me.

[Fartie]

Congrats, it's considerably faster now.

[Johnnie F.]

Some hotlinks in old posts don't work anymore. Newly posted hotlinks do work. I'm too lazy to find out how to make them work again. I think none of them is live-saving. 

[Johnnie F.]

When you change servers why not do a back up, up it to the new server and then redirect from here for a few hours for the dns to catch up.

Changing the A-record had immediate effect. Didn't expect that.