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Ross County once had a website...any theories?


CELTIC1CALEY3

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I would laugh, but on this occasion I really do feel their pain so will leave that to others !!!  If it happened to us (or to ICTFC) then we would be raging on two fronts ... how the host could be so stupid as to run a script in the first place that would do this, and how - in some cases - they apparently dont have a backup they can restore and are urging clients to restore from their own backups (which many wont have as they saved them to another part of their hosting space and the script deleted those too).  

I cant scorn County as it appears they have used a VPS (same as we use and also used by ICTFC) so they are not paying pennies for a cheap hosting solution and these more expensive options typically come with 100% uptime guarantees, daily backups and other administrative bells and whistles that you pay the premium for to avoid situations just like this. If there is a lesson here, it is to backup often (we do it every 2 days, more often when we have a surge in traffic or when we perform major upgrades) and to download a copy of files and DBs almost as often (we do it once per week and again we do it manually if/when we feel its needed).   

The loser in all of this is going to be 123reg.co.uk  .... we do have some domains registered with them (.co.uk ones) but we dont use any of their hosting services as we did not like the offer or some of the comments we read when we were looking. Cant remember the exact details as it was several years ago but we passed them over in favour of another company. They already look like they will be facing a group action from a lawyers firm whose site also went down but as an online host, whatever the financial cost, the damage to their reputation is worse and this will haunt them for years to come. Good luck marketing themselves when they are always going to be known as the company that deleted part of the internet !

 If County want a good host they could do worse than looked at Wired Tree. We have used them for several years and had little or no problems despite them being based in Chicago USA. Their response time to tickets is typically only a few minutes and the support staff actually have a clue and work with us to resolve issues rather than just using the typical response we used to get from another (cheaper) provider which is always to blame the customer or a script on their website for being at fault .... 

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Surely there is a strong case for having two hosts? One live and another storing your site backup data. I have some experience in this field and companies that I worked for had at least three generations of data backup, with one stored at a separate geographical location. I understand this all costs money but then so does losing all your valuable data.

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Yes. definite case for hosting in more than one place, but in the real world very few companies, far less individuals have the budget to double their costs for a "just in case" scenario. Most of them might use their hosts backup service (we do) but if the same problem hits their backup servers as did their main servers and the provider or users themselves dont have an offsite backup you are royally f***** !

We DO have two hosts. Our main VPS hosting and a secondary shared host for emergencies or stuff with a smaller overhead. We dont store backups on the shared host, we use it for other bits and pieces and we do make use of the hosting providers daily and weekly backups, offsite backups and on top of this we add our own scheduled offsite backups. If we were to go down, or there was an issue of some sort we should be able to get back up and running with minimal loss of data. In light of this event though, we are going to go back and take a look at our processes just to be sure! Maybe increase the frequency of our backups and do a bit of testing.    

Looks like the RCFC site is up again so either the host or the club did have a restorable backup somewhere. From a tech perspective I am happy they got it solved quickly. Have been in the situation of having to restore a backup on here before and its not fun. 

 

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