In the afternoon of September 12, 2009, NOVALISTIC and Sanity Derailment, along with many other sites, went down unglamorously (is there even such a word?), spitting a nasty 403 Forbidden error anywhere one went.

We’re back now! So what happened?

Simply put: we went down because our host, Holdfire, was going to perform a server migration that’d affect all customers under one shared hosting server. (Yes, I’m under shared hosting, you can stop laughing now.)

After the sites were safely escorted to the new server, lots of things — undesirable things — happened…

Because a server migration is a very long process which requires a lot of care (imagine tens if not hundreds of customers hanging on to a single shared server for dear life, that’s a lot of home folders!), data loss is a very big issue. To prevent any changes to files which would present that kind of risk of corrupted and/or missing data, every single area of the server was 403′d, including HTTP.

That means nobody could see my sites. That means neither could Googlebot. A while after the site came back up, on September 20th, I did a quick Google search for NOVALISTIC.

The domain NOVALISTIC.com was gone from the results. dev.NOVALISTIC, blog.NOVALISTIC and the Twitter account were all there, as well as a bunch of irrelevant sites, but the main, second-level domain itself wasn’t!

Google Webmaster Tools is a nifty tool for you to monitor such things as Googlebot crawl statistics. It’s even more useful when used alongside Google Analytics. Webmaster Tools reported to me a whole big bunch of 403 errors coming from many, many parts of the domain, so I began to find all sorts of ways to determine the cause. As this was only one of several problems to have surfaced since the server migration (the rest of which I write about following this), to be frank I actually began to put the blame on that. I remained faithful to Holdfire, though, and never held any grudges — they were just doing their job.

I even got a direct message on Twitter from Kim Sherrell offering some advice. Thanks Kim! But it looks like the 403s were indeed a very probable cause, as just almost 3 days later, the site came back up on Google’s indexes — indicating that Googlebot had just gone back to take another look at the site, then receiving a thumbs-up, 200!

Another major issue I’m having, which remains unresolved, is PHP having serious trouble with FTP, causing WordPress plugin management (installing, updating) to break. Previously things worked normally, and plugins would install and update in a flash.

Now that these processes either take ages or even fail prematurely (leaving a few megabytes of core dump too!), I imagine I’ll have a really hard time updating WordPress itself too.

EDIT [10/22]: Holdfire has just fixed the FTP problem!

Other issues I faced were Apache forgetting to pass PHP scripts to PHP, as well as some minor mail errors (these turned out to be due to my ignorance and not by Holdfire). These problems were pretty minor though, and therefore easily solved, leaving me to close tickets happily. Thanks for lending a hand, Holdfire.

Anyway, now that I’m on a new server, I can continue working on the new NOVALISTIC, and at the same time figure out anymore trivial issues I encounter, one-by-one.

Thanks for your patience the past week :)