"Under Maintenance" pages during migrations

***GatorPatrick*** · #1 10-17-2008, 12:49 AM

We are now placing a very generic "Under Maintenance" page up while we perform our Apache2 + CentOS5 migrations. This should provide a decent placeholder for all of our clients while we perform necessary maintenance. If you see this page (grey background, big Under Maintenance heading) then it should be less than an hour before your sites are back online (barring unforseen circumstances).

Please let me know if there are any further suggestions for this.

James P · #2 10-17-2008, 01:20 PM

Good move, in my opinion!

mcb · #3 10-22-2008, 11:18 PM

Actually, I don't think it worked out so well, at least for me - I saw the message (actually I saw a 404 error for my phpBB forum, then went to the main page of my web domain) and saw "Under Maintenance - We are currently performing scheduled maintenance. We will be back soon!", so I went to the Network Status forum which is where we are accustomed to see maintenance messages, and there was nothing there about my server (gator206). I almost picked up the phone to report what was apparently an outage (since it was not listed there), but decided to check General Announcements as well and saw this.

The point is, it would have been just as easy to put up a page that said "Performing OS and web server upgrades, expected to last approximately one hour" (or however long) and a pointer to the URL of the support forum message or thread. Er, next time, maybe?

navjotjsingh · #4 10-23-2008, 10:56 PM

Strangely none of my sites show such pages. Instead all are returning 404 errors except 1 which is loading main page but other pages are inaccessible with some pink colored page with some httpd error.

***GatorPatrick*** · #5 10-24-2008, 01:58 AM

This will not happen anymore. I've replaced the 404 page in our portable httpd maintenance package with a "under maintenance page". It previously was occurring because of people with bookmarked links to their sites. If you went to the root of the domain i.e "hostgator.com" it would show the maintenance page. But "hostgator.com/index.php" would have returned a 404.

jamestl2 · #6 10-27-2008, 12:24 AM

Heh, I was wondering why my website just came up with an "under maintenance" page.

Just wondering how long this is supposed to last for....

***GatorPatrick*** · #7 10-27-2008, 01:37 AM

It only lasts for about 30-40 minutes while Apache Recompiles after the Operating System upgrade.

Homeprospect · #8 10-28-2008, 09:05 PM

Ridiculous! If you are doing maintenence why don't you send an email to us or even post it on our websites that it's Host Monster Servers that have maintenence issues and you are fixing them. I go to my website and see a generic "Under Maintenence" so I have to go into my files and figure out why it says that. I thought it was being jacked by someone....

And I had just sent out 50 personalized emails from the account one hour prior for people to visit my site. They all emailed me back and said it was Under Maintenence.

Well I wouldn't have emailed them if I knew that was going to happen. So I had to reply to 50 emails on what happened. Waste of time. Put something nice up next time and explain is my suggestion.

RainbowViper · #9 10-28-2008, 10:37 PM

Homeprospect,

The new HG cPanel theme, being released this week, will allow you to subscribe to an email notification of Scheduled Maintenance.

***GatorPatrick*** · #10 10-28-2008, 10:43 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Homeprospect

Ridiculous! If you are doing maintenence why don't you send an email to us or even post it on our websites that it's Host Monster Servers that have maintenence issues and you are fixing them. I go to my website and see a generic "Under Maintenence" so I have to go into my files and figure out why it says that. I thought it was being jacked by someone....

And I had just sent out 50 personalized emails from the account one hour prior for people to visit my site. They all emailed me back and said it was Under Maintenence.

Well I wouldn't have emailed them if I knew that was going to happen. So I had to reply to 50 emails on what happened. Waste of time. Put something nice up next time and explain is my suggestion.

The reason we do not post that it's Hostgator performing maintenance is due to many of our clients wanting to rebrand their site and not let their clients know who their provider is. As such we try to be as least intrusive as possible, and thus the generic under maintenance page.

I apologize if the migrations inconvenienced you during this time and I understand how frustrating situations like that can be. If there's any outstanding issues with your account you can PM me and I'll be glad to assist you in any way I can.

pmtbiker · #11 10-29-2008, 09:15 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by RainbowViper

Homeprospect,

The new HG cPanel theme, being released this week, will allow you to subscribe to an email notification of Scheduled Maintenance.

Ours is upgraded but I don't see any of these yet, I'll be waiting for this one. Hopefully shared server cpanel theme can be manually change without submitting a ticket.

rjhoward · #12 03-17-2009, 12:20 AM

Would it kill you to give some indication of the nature of the outage on this page? I just spent an hour trying to figure out why half of my f*cking sites are down!

dhruv37 · #13 03-17-2009, 01:02 AM

Atleast you guys should sent us an email about Migration, so that we can have idea of the same and also we can inform the same to our clients.

James P · #14 03-17-2009, 01:22 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by RainbowViper

Homeprospect,

The new HG cPanel theme, being released this week, will allow you to subscribe to an email notification of Scheduled Maintenance.

This will be very good. As an aside, it looks like the list of "under maintenance" servers has now grown substantially.

rychan · #15 03-17-2009, 07:58 AM

Wow, now I've got mysql errors on half my pages on roughly 60-odd websites.

I'm on voyager, is this under process or complete and now something I'm going to have to worry about?

rychan · #16 03-17-2009, 08:25 AM

After talking to one of your technicians he said the issue may be related to a decrease in length on mysql usernames.

Is this true? If so can the users be restored and the length increased?

Otherwise I've now got a torrid few days in front of me testing each site and admin system.

Cjddrum1 · #17 03-17-2009, 09:06 AM

My database was messed up. Started last night with mysql errors, then I got a maintenance page, and now when you go to my site I just get a database error, I've called support and opened a ticekt, I believe he said I was on gator225 server?

Anyways, my database file size is only at .01mb now

Hopefully you guys can figure out whats going on and get it back to normal. I' haven't had a problem so far in 2 years and trust that you will work this out

srfox · #18 03-17-2009, 09:24 AM

Any update????????

Cjddrum1 · #19 03-17-2009, 09:31 AM

Mine is back up, thanks HG!

dhruv37 · #20 03-17-2009, 09:41 AM

Now we are facing MySQL server issue.... its showing - Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket

When I am login through cPanel I am not able to see any database or dbuser on the sites.....hope you guys have latest backup and will restore ASAP.

Facing major business loss as we are running many ecommerce sites, pls do needfull ASAP.

GvilleRick · #21 03-17-2009, 10:14 AM

This is a peer support forum and the thread that was reopened was from October of last year. The best option would be to contact support either through a ticket or Live Chat to determine the status if the server is undergoing service.

rychan · #22 03-17-2009, 10:26 AM

Just an update,

Looks like it was indeed a length reduction in the username for the mysql databases. I've gone through a bunch of my sites reducing the length in the related files and they're back up and running now.

You can view the new shorter usernames in your cpanel which should help out anyone else with this problem.

Thanks once again to the handy live support crew for diagnosing the problem

unicorncrazy12 · #23 03-17-2009, 01:17 PM

It looks like my site has been rolled back to 3 days ago. Was all of the data for the last few days lost? I did a site backup last night, can that be used?

limebird · #24 03-17-2009, 02:35 PM

My database has also been rolled back, although not as bad as 3 days ago like unicorncrazy.

I've lost a lot of data (along with website user information that was created before the roll-back) and this is very upsetting to me because my site is in the delicate start-up phase where every member counts.

Spent some time with support trying to figure out whether there was an appropriate snapshot of my database that I could access to even just manually restore the information I'm loooking for, but the latest one they could pull up was before the information I was looking for was added to the database.

Sad.

Jackuul · #25 03-17-2009, 02:52 PM

My database wasn't rolled back - but it sure was smacked around. Now I am missing the last portion of it starting with the tables that record sessions, and ending with the user tables.

Whatever this thing was that they did, I sure do wish I had a few days warning. I would have made a much more recent backup of my data. Plus, my backup drive that I use for web backups is toasted as of ten minutes ago. Click click click click click click... I have it in the freezer on the outside hope that the old trick will work. I know it wont - but I have done everything else.

I just hope there is some kind of snapshot from at least the past month. It was weird though - I went to bed at 2am after working on it and fixing the crashed tables. Everything was there. I figured "hey, tomorrow I'll make a fresh backup".

I woke up to 20 angry emails from members of the site.

I really do wish I could have been warned.

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