Back online, but database lost

[Brian Turner]

Well, we're finally back online.

What a cock up that was.

The move was rushed because the account it was hosted on came back up for renewal. So I closed this place down thinking we'd maybe have 3 days downtime as I propagated the domain.

Excepting that I wasn't able to propagate the domain properly, because I hadn't yet found a suitable hosting account.

I was looking at UK reseller accounts with CPanel, and they were surpringly uncommon. And when I finally found one and I tried to set everything up, nothing worked properly.

To cut a long story short, they didn't allow use of private nameservers, which I didn't realise - and their support system was poorly set up so there were a lot of crossed wires.

Oh - and when I'd moved my main e-mail domain earlier, I'd neglected to recreate my personal e-mail box - so everything was a confused f'ed up mess.

It took a couple of days before I figured all that out.

So then I looked for a new host.

Only when I tried to purchase, a bug in ModernBill wouldn't let me pay for goods. More delay.

They manually set up the payment and I waited for the domain to propagate again.

And then I tried to set up the forum.

Only guess what? The back-up I made before moving - for some reason - was not compressed properly. It was corrupted. The most recent other back-up was a month old.

And then there was more delay because phpmyadmin kept freezing up when I tried to upload the backup SQL file. Took a day to get that sorted out.

Only finally have we gone back online again. It's only taken - what - 10 days? Just to move one website from one server to another?

Cup of tea time methinks.

Oh - and welcome back.

[Brian Turner]

Just a note - because the forum was still fairly young we've lost around 400 posts and 30+ members - effectively, a third of the database is gone.

And for some reason we lost all the avatars in the move as well.

Still, I have every intention of pushing this forum further on into better things. There's no way I'm going to allow set-backs to stop us - business-talk is again alive and well - long may it stay that way.

[Brian Turner]

Oh - and some slight tweaks to the design as well - should have improved contrast now.

[Brian Turner]

PS - and welcome to London.

[peterjhale]

Well, it's good you are back - I bet you lost a few users in the meantime - let's hope you can build the business back up again.
Peter

[Suzanne]

I found a panicked e-mail in my box and this explains it. One third of the database lost? Still it's a young forum still establishing itself. I think you'll do fine with it. And I like the colors. You've taken the greys and made them dark blue. The contrast speaks more of a forum.

[Suzanne]

Oh you recovered avatars? Well obviously.

[Brian Turner]

Thanks for the comments - we are certinly going to move forwards again - and perhaps even stronger.

I've been able to recover some of the avatars, from a much earlier full site backup, and am now promoting this site much more aggressively.

I'm also going to make sure that I'm more at hand for shaping this place. It's a set back, but nothing will stop this place growing now.

[peterjhale]

What terms are you targeting for business talk?

I know it's private data - but what kinda traffic do you see ?

Do you see people clicking on your adwords at all ?

Ta

[Brian Turner]

I'm actually marketing via the SEO way - at least for the present.

I'm involved in link-building campaigns throughout the day, so on top of that I do a little for this place.

On Google.com we're ranked no.1 for "business forums uk" and we're 8th for "business forums".

On Google.co.uk searches for UK pages only, we're 3rd for "business forums", 2nd for "Google forum", and 3rd for "SEO forum".

These are only starter terms - I'm already building PR nicely - should make a 6 soon, and am channeling that into key areas. All I really need to add to that is ensure there's a good supply of content. That all helps with hoovering up a wide range of low-frequency searches.

And on the human user side, I obviously need to foster a sense of community as well.