Jason Myres
Administrator
WTFH?....That's basically what I asked the technical support guy at our new web host driving into work last Monday. Troubleshooting a major outage over the phone in LA rush hour has an odd sort of charm.
"There seems to have been a mistake with your data migration."
For the second time in four years, the hosting company we've been with has been sold. The first time was in 2013, and the second occurred this past month. The company we've been with the past three years decided to exit web hosting to focus on enterprise, which is tough because they were really, really good. The company that bought us, on the other hand, couldn't get our data migration right.
So, Lift Gamma Gain went down early in the morning Monday 21st, and after a lot emails and phone calls it was clear we wouldn't be up soon. We weren't the only website down, and Holiday/ Black Friday online shopping craziness wasn't helping, so that's when we put up the splash page saying we'd be back on Sunday.
We needed every single day, but the good news is we didn't lose any of our data. After a crazy week of trying to recover the site we were technically back up early Saturday morning. As soon as the site was online, I began transferring it to a new hosting provider I've been using for other projects over the past two years. They are awesome and huge. If anyone buys them, it's going to have to be someone like IBM. And hopefully IBM will get our data migration right.
In the process of migrating to the new server, we took advantage of the opportunity to update everything; our server software, the forum system, the main site design, as well as retiring a number of add-on features that have newer/ better versions included right in the forum system.
Some highlights:
• Completely Responsive design that re-formats for your web browser, tablet, or phone.
• Advanced Message Editor with Drafts (saved up to 48 hours), Autosave (every 60 seconds), and...
• iPhone-Style Emojis available in the new "Emoji Smiles" tab when you post.
• Content tagging: Add tags like dci-p3, looks, calibration, alexa, R3D, etc to make your posts easier to find with...
• New Advanced Search Engine. Search terms as small as three characters (finally!). Tons of new filters, like tags, username, time period, subforum, etc.
• Ability to call attention to a post with Twitter-style user shoutouts using @username.
• Multi-quote: Click the "Quote" button on each post you'd like to include before you click "Reply" allowing you to include all the posts you need in one step.
• Updated media linking, embedding, and image gallery support in user messages.
• Features like Top Posts, Most Likes, New Posts, Latest Threads, Notable Users, and other features that were handled by add-ons before, are now handled directly in the forum system.
• Many services we used for things like Twitter and RSS integration have been replaced with newer, more advanced alternatives.
• A long list of new security and bug fixes, and of course...
• General performance and stability improvements.
The earlier version of the site gave us very few problems, and was the result of four years of refinement and configuration. I was able to bring over about 90% of the changes from our old forum, but there are still some things to add, especially to the design of the site, as well as some new features we'll install soon.
It appears we have some user avatars missing, so any of you that uploaded an avatar directly to the forum (as opposed to using Gravatar) may need to re-upload them.
Any new users that signed up at the time of the outage (Nov 20th-21st) may need to sign up again. Please use the same email you used before and we'll get you approved.
If you run into any issues, feel free to post about it in this thread and we'll check it out.
Thanks for being so patient while we brought everything back online.
Jason
"There seems to have been a mistake with your data migration."
For the second time in four years, the hosting company we've been with has been sold. The first time was in 2013, and the second occurred this past month. The company we've been with the past three years decided to exit web hosting to focus on enterprise, which is tough because they were really, really good. The company that bought us, on the other hand, couldn't get our data migration right.
So, Lift Gamma Gain went down early in the morning Monday 21st, and after a lot emails and phone calls it was clear we wouldn't be up soon. We weren't the only website down, and Holiday/ Black Friday online shopping craziness wasn't helping, so that's when we put up the splash page saying we'd be back on Sunday.
We needed every single day, but the good news is we didn't lose any of our data. After a crazy week of trying to recover the site we were technically back up early Saturday morning. As soon as the site was online, I began transferring it to a new hosting provider I've been using for other projects over the past two years. They are awesome and huge. If anyone buys them, it's going to have to be someone like IBM. And hopefully IBM will get our data migration right.
In the process of migrating to the new server, we took advantage of the opportunity to update everything; our server software, the forum system, the main site design, as well as retiring a number of add-on features that have newer/ better versions included right in the forum system.
Some highlights:
• Completely Responsive design that re-formats for your web browser, tablet, or phone.
• Advanced Message Editor with Drafts (saved up to 48 hours), Autosave (every 60 seconds), and...
• iPhone-Style Emojis available in the new "Emoji Smiles" tab when you post.
• Content tagging: Add tags like dci-p3, looks, calibration, alexa, R3D, etc to make your posts easier to find with...
• New Advanced Search Engine. Search terms as small as three characters (finally!). Tons of new filters, like tags, username, time period, subforum, etc.
• Ability to call attention to a post with Twitter-style user shoutouts using @username.
• Multi-quote: Click the "Quote" button on each post you'd like to include before you click "Reply" allowing you to include all the posts you need in one step.
• Updated media linking, embedding, and image gallery support in user messages.
• Features like Top Posts, Most Likes, New Posts, Latest Threads, Notable Users, and other features that were handled by add-ons before, are now handled directly in the forum system.
• Many services we used for things like Twitter and RSS integration have been replaced with newer, more advanced alternatives.
• A long list of new security and bug fixes, and of course...
• General performance and stability improvements.
The earlier version of the site gave us very few problems, and was the result of four years of refinement and configuration. I was able to bring over about 90% of the changes from our old forum, but there are still some things to add, especially to the design of the site, as well as some new features we'll install soon.
It appears we have some user avatars missing, so any of you that uploaded an avatar directly to the forum (as opposed to using Gravatar) may need to re-upload them.
Any new users that signed up at the time of the outage (Nov 20th-21st) may need to sign up again. Please use the same email you used before and we'll get you approved.
If you run into any issues, feel free to post about it in this thread and we'll check it out.
Thanks for being so patient while we brought everything back online.
Jason
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