Some of you may have noticed some odd goings on around here this past week. On Monday morning one of the plugins – updraft -wanted to run an automatic update. It caused the WordPress installation to crash. I had to disable all of the plugins and restart them before we discovered which one was causing the problem. Not updraft it seems, but total cache.
We deleted that and everything seemed to be fine. I did notice in my stats during the week, however, that visitor numbers had fallen off dramatically. Was it something I said?
On Saturday morning I decided to log out and see the blog as my visitors see it as it became obvious that no one was visiting the most recent posts. That’s when I realised why no one was visiting. The last post showing was from the previous Sunday. Although some posts during the week had been visible to some people and quite why is anyone’s guess, for the most part, my post on prosecuting Gadaffi was the last one I’d left. That was what was showing in my RSS feed, too.
Then people started asking why I had stopped. I hadn’t, I’d just been talking to myself and anyone who happened through the wormhole.
Mike Rouse managed to get to the bottom of it this evening. It seems that Total Cache had left some rogue code in the htaccess file causing people to see the last cached page. I’d never have thought of looking there, I must admit.
Anyway, things are back up and running. As I’ll be migrating to a new server sometime during the week, I’ll be gone again for a day or so when we reassign the DNS. So when it happens, no I’ve not disappeared into the sunset, I’ll only be gone for a brief while.
” I did notice in my stats during the week, however, that visitor numbers had fallen off dramatically.”
I rely on the RSS update to show me when a new post is up from someone in my blogroll. It looked like you hadn’t made any.
Until this morning! 🙂
Oddly I had no problem from my works computer, but could only get as recent as the Gadaffi post from home.
I thought it was a problem at my end – glad it’s not.
I could see all the posts. (Mac with Firefox).
Visited a few times, just had nothing to say….. 😉
It must have been something to do with the way htaccess interacted with different browsers. Our desktop with IE could see it but not with Firefox. The laptop couldn’t see it with either browser.
XP laptop with Firefox – I haven’t seen anything new since last Sunday, until I checked last night. Another blogger I know has been having plugin problems related to WordPress as well.
I use OpenDNS if that’s of any relevance.
I was getting all your posts too.
A planned migration to a new server should not result in a day or so’s downtime. A few minutes is more like it, and even that is unnecessary. Please give whoever is responsible for that a clip round the ear. (Even if it’s yourself)
Ciaran, the last time I did this it took about 24 hours for the nameservers to point to the new server. This seems to be pretty standard from what I understand…
In brief:
*It takes exactly 0 seconds for your authoritative DNS server to start providing a different IP address.
*However, other DNS servers, clients, etc, will not re-query your nameservers every time they want to know the IP address – they will cache it and only re-query when their copy is stale.
*You tell them how long they should use a cached version, before they consider it stale – this is done by the TTL in your DNS record.
*You can set the TTL to be 24 hours. This reduces the load on your DNS server, but means that if you change the IP address, there is a period of 24 hours when some people will be hitting the old one, and some will be seeing the new one.
*On the other hand, you can set the TTL to be 5 minutes. This is something you would do if you were about to move from one server to another.
*If you set it to 5 minutes, then when you make the change there will be a period of 5 minutes where some people are connecting to your old server, and some to your new.
*You will not have switched off the old server during this period, thus the site will not be invisible. (The only issue would be that if they comment, it would go into the old database. You could disable comments on the old server when you make the switch, if this was an issue).
*For bonus points, at the moment you make the switch on the DNS server, you make the old server run a reverse proxy so it transparently feeds vistors content directly from the new server. In this case, they can still comment.
The above assumes you are simply moving the site from one server to another (changing the IP address on the A record), but your actual nameservers are remaining the same. Things are slightly more complicated if you actually change nameservers (e.g. you are moving from one domain registrar to another). Even then though, there is no *need* for anything other than a totally seamless transition. The only variables are a) whether you can be arsed, and b) whether one of your existing hosts/registrars is lacking in capabilities (e.g. they won’t let you change the TTL)
Apologies for technobabblifying your comments section. Feel free to email me if you want specific advice about this.
P.S. Your TTL is currently 600 (seconds), so that ought to be your worst case time – not 24 hours.
Thanks for that. I’m switching to a new host but using the same registrar, so will be reassigning the nameservers. It’s the registrar that’s advising 24 hours.
I don’t know if I can change the TTL – I’ll ask Mike as he is doing the migration for me.