Inside LabourStart

This was the explanation we received from 1&1 Internet:

The website is in fact hosted on an auxiliary server which is designed to withstand a higher load, although it was still not able to handle the load your site generated.   I assume the increased traffic from the campaign generated a larger load then what our standard web hosting servers could handle.

As a result, for something like 34 hours, our website was essentially offline.

What next?

I’ve been discussing with Nick Holden the idea of moving our site to a virtual server hosted by a company called Memset which has a very good reputation.  The main thing we need now is improved service — it should not have taken six telephone calls, countless emails, and 34 hours to solve this problem.

Nor should 1&1 have taken us offline without first consulting us.

Moving servers should involve basically three steps:

• Moving all the files over — ideally first zipping them, and then unzipping them on the new site to preserve directory structure and permissions.
• Moving over the MySQL databases (there are now five).
• Moving over the domain names (and sub-domains).

I’ve offered to employ Nick to do this for us and to act as tech support.  He uses Memset to host his various sites, so he knows them well.  Our mailing lists are hosted on one of their servers.

As LabourStart has grown — and grown more important — we really can’t afford to use a low-cost service like 1&1 which is simply too bureaucratic and too anonymous for us when we have a crisis.

Please don’t hesitate to post your comments, questions and suggestions.