Moving from Dreamhost to Knownhost

QOT has had a longer downtime than expected. Dreamhost disabled our account without warning for TOS violation. We are still trying to figure how we violated the TOS, and would have done all to fix any issue we were unaware of.

We searched for a new managed VPS hosting service and were recommended Knownhost by many Twitter friends. So we are migrating to Knownhost and this has given us an opportunity to spread our wings on a VPS server, which will help QOT to grow beyond the restraints of shared web hosting. It costs more, but is worth the money.

The site has been down now for 4 days, in efforts to get our account back, get backups, find a new host, setup a new VPS, set up new private nameservers and now the site is in place and undergoing DNS propagation for over 24 hours. I hope Google gets our traffic back when we get back online.

We hope to be back online soon with tech tricks and blogging tips. We learnt a lot from this experience and cannot wait to share it with our readers. Lets wait and see all goes well...

Site Offline: Dreamhost Server Fails

The site is down over the last 2 days. Dreamhost points out that it is due to a server issue on which our site is hosted.

The web server, bulger, is having issues with its raid and attempts to move the drives over to a new server have also failed. We’re currently bringing up a new server and restoring it from backups… More information to come!

Update: Further hardware disaster with this machine has extended downtime, unfortunately. We are still working on it and we hope to have it back up soon. We are very sorry for the inconvenience.

Update 06:35 PDT: The machine is back up now but is still restoring from backups and some configurations are still running on the server. Websites should be up for the most part but if they’re not, don’t fret as we’re still working on it! We’ll post more updates as they come in!

Update 8:11 PM PDT: The server is still restoring from backups but sites should be online. You will notice a bit of instability meanwhile all the backups are restored but this is only temporary and subside once everything is restored. We’ll post the all clear once everything is good to go!

Well the site did come back online for a few hours over the last 2 days but it is still down. I emailed Dreamhost support and they inform us that

Thanks for writing in! I am *VERY* sorry for the inconvenience! The server that you are on, bulger, has been having a few problems as of yesterday. I'll go ahead and explain what happened. Basically, bulger was having issues with its RAID setup and the server was going up and down intermittently. Our network admins went ahead and decided that we needed to fail the existing hardware over to new hardware in order to restore functionally to the server! The new hardware has been installed and the server is running BUT the I/O from the rsync of backup data is causing problems for people on the server. I don't have an ETA for when the rsync will be done but we'll get this squared away as soon as possible! I really do apologize for the inconvenience and I totally understand how frustrating a server being up and down is. That is why our network admin team is working hard to bring it up now.

Well with no time frame in sight, lets see how long before the site comes back online.