Wednesday, August 5th, 2009
I am a backup maniac. I backup and then backup the backup. Then, I seal up the backed up backup, stick it in a safe and plunge the safe in concrete. Even with all that, I will probably lose data eventually. I didn’t get like this overnight. I’ve had…let’s say…experience.
You know, it’s strange – with all the people out there who rely so heavily on all their computer files, very few of them ever back up anything. The worst part of it is that the majority of them work on laptops. I used to work with a girl who was in sales. One day, she came into work all upset that her laptop crashed and she lost all of her data. There was nothing she could do. When I say she lost everything, I mean the computer repair dude handed her back a laptop with wires hanging out of it. It was toast.
I said to her, “Oh don’t worry, just go grab your backup and we’ll load it up for you.” Her blank stare was priceless. I mean seriously, how long did she think her computer was going to last? It was bumped and bruised for years. Whatever. I knew she didn’t back up anything, I was just being a wisea$$. It was easy to pick on her because she had some pretty wild political views. I didn’t take too kindly to that.
Okay, onto my situation. I have websites. I back up all the data I have on the servers quite frequently. It’s a big job and it gets done a lot, but I just do it because it’s important. After the “Oh sorry sir, we don’t really have that backup up” I got from my old friends at “1 and…” hosting company, I decided to get real. I now have a pretty serious setup. Even with a new host and private servers, I still download everything. I don’t care what they tell me. One guy said, “A meteor has to hit this building for us to lose your data.” Yeah, famous last words.
Here’s a piece of advice for any of you who run websites – never trust what a hosting company says, no matter what kind of triple platinum guarantee they give you. When something happens and it comes time to get down, it’s awfully easy for them to tell you they don’t have what you need and to rush you off the phone. Here’s another piece of advice, stay very far, far away from technical support that is based in a foreign country. I don’t want to knock the support, I do want to say that the company doesn’t give these support people any power to do anything. They are basically telephone operators who create support tickets. With the old servers and “1 and…” (I forget the name), I actually had a server down for about two weeks. I just couldn’t get someone to restart Apache. I could have flown to the data center, walked in and restarted the thing myself. You want to talk about stress? Man oh man. It was rough living with me for those two weeks.
Okay, back to my situation. I back up my data from the servers. It’s probably about 15 gigs. Then, I have about 2 more gigs of working files on my desktop. So, overall, I have about 17 gigs that I really don’t trust sitting here on my computer. I back up on a portable drive, another external drive and online, all encrypted. I will say that devising ways to back up data gets quite addictive. Three backups is really enough, but I might have some others hidden.
It goes even further than that. My online backup can’t be in the same city as where my servers are. I know, I know, but trust me, when push comes to shove, it matters. Tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc… Remember when I said that the guy from the hosting company told me that a meteor had to hit the building for me to lose my data? Well, during the first week of me hosting with them, a car hit a telephone pole in a main intersection near one of their data centers. They were forced to run on generators for two days. I now have my servers split up between two data centers in two states.
Up until today, I was using MozyPro as my online backup service. They offer a pretty good service with lots of great features. Luckily, I never had to recover any files, but I’m sure they would have done a fine job if I needed them.
A few days ago, I noticed that I wasn’t receiving my nightly summary backup emails. I looked into the reason why and it ended up that my files weren’t actually being uploaded to the backup servers. This was a Friday. I called support and was connected to an obvious foreign country. My face got red. I explained the situation and a ticket was created. Then Monday, I got a response that the ticket was escalated. Two full days had gone by with nothing done. I called support again and got nowhere. My next call was to sales to close down my account. I don’t deal well with outsourced support. I have a long experience with being politely told that nothing is going to get resolved.
Today, I set up an account with Jungle Disk. From what I hear, they are pretty good. My files are being backed up as I sit here and write. I am under no illusion that the support is any better, but I had to do something. If I need to keep jumping to different online backup companies, so be it.
There are a few things that I like about Jungle Disk (run by Amazon, bought out by Rackspace) that MozyPro didn’t give up too easily. First, I can download the software onto any computer and just run it under the same account. I can upload and download on any of my five PCs. I like that. I can even get files from the road. Second, they charge for usage. You don’t need to buy a certain amount of space and then worry about returning unused resources. That’s pretty helpful.
Jungle Disk was very easy to set up and is quite simple to operate as well. It’s also very affordable. To top things off, I trust Jungle Disk because one of my favorite relatives uses it, along with many of his friends. Hey, word of mouth…there ain’t no better way.
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Monday, September 15th, 2008
Today has been an interesting day. We have been taking a look at our websites and searching for duplicate content using Copyscape. After today’s findings, we might just go with Copyscape’s premium service.
Now, let me just tell you that duplicate content is everywhere. Actually, someone has probably written this sentence a million times. What we were searching for today was blatant and far reaching content theft. We found a few instances of one of our homepages and general website idea taken for someone else’s use as well as many instances of interior pages taken. Needless to say, we made screen copies of these cases and sent them to our attorney’s office. These are serious and can’t be ignored.
I would like to talk about two things you can do to help out a more subtle form of duplicate content, on your own website.
The first form of duplicate content on your own website is in the form of www vs. non-www. If you go to your website and type in “www.mysite.com” and then type in “mysite.com,” you may see the same page appear. In the search engine’s eyes, these are two copies of the same page. How do you fix this? It’s easy. Just open up your .htaccess file and type in the following code:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.mysite\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]
When someone types in “mysite.com” to visit your website, they will automatically be forwarded to “www.mysite.com.” The search engines will be forwarded as well.
Another form of duplicate content on your own website comes in the form of “www.mysite.com/” vs. “www.mysite.com/index.html.” The search engines see this same page as two different ones. What to do? That’s easy too. Just open up your .htaccess again and type in the following code:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ http://www.mysite.com/ [R=301,L]
When someone either types in “www.mysite.com/index.html” or follows a link like that to your website, they will be automatically be forwarded to “www.mysite.com.”
Now, here is the disclaimer. I used this on my server setup and it worked. Please check with your own hosting company to see if something similar will work for your too.
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Friday, May 23rd, 2008
Last night around 8PM, I heard the surge protectors/battery backups that we have for the computers beep. It’s the first time I heard that since we have been here. I am pretty used to it because they are rather sensitive. Any power fluctuation causes them to beep. It is comforting.
I didn’t think anything of it. Then, a little while later, I tried to access some websites that I have on one of my servers. I couldn’t get on. I tried again a little while later and still couldn’t get on. I asked Laura if she was able to get to the sites and she said no. She told me that she was working on one of them when she couldn’t get to it anymore. I figured the hosting company’s monitoring “red light” would’ve gone off by now and the server would be brought back on line by them. Nothing. I decided to submit a support ticket.
The hosting company responded to the support ticket informing me that they could access the server and all the sites just fine. I then called my sister down in Chapel Hill, NC to see if she could log on to the sites. She could access them just fine too. The strange thing is that I was able to see all the websites on my other server like nothing was wrong.
I responded to the hosting company ticket and let them know that I could not access the servers from only my location, but it seems like the rest of the world was looking at the sites without issue. I felt so left out. They asked me for my IP address so they could check the firewall. That was fine. Then, they asked me to do a traceroute to the server. I did that and the connection timed out at the server. Then, they did a traceroute from the server back to me, and the connection was timing out at my location.
This was all getting kind of odd. They asked that I power cycle the modem. I did and the problem was solved. I was able to access the server again.
What I find puzzling is that I was only blocked from one server in the world…mine. How did this happen. After thinking for a while, I remember right at the moment of the power hiccup, the issue began. Could being on a website at the time of a power surge (or failure) make your modem block you from the website (server) you were looking at?
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Friday, April 25th, 2008
Back in the old house, we had DSL for about 2 1/2 years. It worked well with only a few minor issues. Towards the end, I did begin inquiring about more upload and download speed. I called Frontier and they said I was maxed out…that’s all they had. The reason I needed more speed is because I have a few weekly chores I need to do which required downloading about a gig’s worth of files. It has gotten pretty nonsensical.
Yesterday, we had the guy from Comcast cable come over to hook up the TV, phone and internet package. After a while, he got it all hooked up. I did some work last night and then some again this morning, but didn’t notice all that much more speed. I think the DSL we had before had a download speed of 1.5 Mbps (short for megabits per second). I am not sure what we have now, but I do know that a file that used to take about 10 minutes to download now takes about 3. That makes my life doing chores a heck of a lot faster. I think I heard something about 6 Mbps, but I’m not sure.
Come to find out, after talking to my hosting company today, I need a static IP address, not a dynamic one. This is for one reason or another. I called Comcast regarding this and was connected to the business area. I may have to get my package split up…the internet under a business account and the TV and phone under a residential account. They are going to call me on Monday.
What’s the point of this post? I think cable is faster than DSL.
Ok, bye.
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