The Lifestream now on a new host – Success!

EDIT: Success!!! No more borkage! We’re now on hostgator.

Dear visitor,

We are currently in the process of moving TLS to a new host. After a year on Bluehost, we’ve decided that we’re not satisfied – especially on the forums, people have experienced frequent downtime, which is most likely due to Bluehost’s CPU throttling – or, our site being too active for said limits.

We will be moving to Hostgator by member recommendation. Like Bluehost, it offers unlimited storage and bandwidth (which is needed, considering we’re generating between 130 and 200 GB of bandwidth a month, and our steadily growing collection of images has grown to 500 MB). However, said members said that sites that generate similar (and more) traffic run smoothly on Hostgator, and it seems the server we’ve been placed on experiences a lot less load than the Bluehost we got – but that might be temporary, might be a newly installed server with not much sites on it yet.

We’ve turned the forums off for the moment, to prevent loss of posts made after the backup which I’ll start in a moment.

We expect to be back up within 24 to 48 hours, depending on how fast the domain name can switch and unforseen consequences. Bear with us for the moment. If you start seeing (database) errors, that means you’re on the new host – I haven’t had the time (read: I started too late) to get the database transferred over yet.

Regards,

Staff.

Update:  Allright, the server seems to be switching back and forth between the old and the new. This is the old one. We’re experiencing problems right now, as the backup program does not seem to back up the full database tables – leaving half the forum posts and the news articles from the past two months behind. I’ll go complain to Bluehost later today, see if I can get a database backup from them. Grr.

Update 2: Success!!! No more borkage! We’re now on hostgator.

If you’ve followed the updates on the (now removed) article, we have experienced some problems earlier with moving the database over. First, the backup was only finished halfway – leaving half our posts on both the frontpage and the forums behind. We contacted Bluehost support and asked them to do a database dump using the proper tool (mysqldump, a commandline tool), which they did for us earlier today. I then proceeded to attempt to import the database into the Hostgator database again using BigDump, but sadly, this did not work – it seems the format used by mysqldump is not really working with that tool or any php based tool for that matter.

So, after much trying, I finally used the commandline importer on my local system… and it was done without problems within half a minute. So, I uploaded the dump filed to the host, and sent a support ticket to Hostgator. They picked it up soon after it was uploaded (which took an hour, cursed be slow uploads), and since five minutes, we’re live again!

What follows next? Well, I’ll turn the forums back on. Next, I’ll cancel the Bluehost hosting, and have the domain name management transferred over to Hostgator – which took a week last time, but hopefully, it won’t cause much downtime (if any at all) considering the site is already using the Hostgator nameservers.

The downtime lasted a full two days, I’m afraid, and for this I apologise – whilst I do work for sites that get well over 250.000 visitors a day, I’m still a bit of an idiot when it comes to cheap hosting and limited options, slash having to use support for things like this, xD. We will see if the forums run steadily for a few weeks, before we try to re-enable the shoutbox and such.

Back to work now, nothing to see here.