We expect plenty of business challenges; and sometimes seemingly simple problems magnify into crises.
Our recent problems with our computer/internet servers reveal how things can get crazy real quick.
The story started about 10 days ago, when our backend WHM (WebHost Manager) sent me a warning email about a server “hardware failure” risk.
I contacted our Internet Service Provider (Hostwinds), which houses our sites on two dedicated servers, for advice. They suggested we should move all of our data onto new servers. They would co-ordinate the backup and migration process and do as much of this work as possible during quiet times.
Alas, things didn’t go according to plan. The migration took far longer than expected, and the work of switching things over began clashsing with our daily publishing cycle. Worse things weren’t quite right at our most important site, Ontarioconstructionnews.com. Files were taking ages to upload, and data was disappearing or becoming inaccessible.
This is not a good problem to have, especially when our business is publishing daily construction news and time-sensitive Certificates of Substantial Performance (CSP) and other mandatory legal notices. In the end, we decided we needed to switch back to the original server — at least for Ontario Construction News — and that just added to the chaos as we then had to re-input data and sort out all kinds of Domain Name Server (DNS) confusion.
Fortunately, despite the problems, we haven’t lost a day’s issue — ensuring timely compliance with CSP notice requirements. But it hasn’t been pretty.
This story in part is a test to see if our content management and editing systems are in order. I needed to make changes here because news story images were not appearing where they should.
Hopefully everything will get back to normal in a day or two. In the meantime, I’m crossing my fingers that you’ll be able to read this story.
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