Later Sunday evening the webserver I migrated my account from earlier in the afternoon suffered a total hardware failure (RAID Array failed) losing all data. Fortunately we were safe as we were now on another server
The old server which was now broken needed to be replaced and was rebuilt during the course of Monday and Tuesday morning. Then at 1pm on Tuesday the old server was brought back online. A monthly backup for the server dated 30th of January was then restored to the server.
Now the confusion for us started when this server came back online as it was accidentally restored with a copy (from the backup) of my account and therefore we had two versions of our website on the Internet.
- 1 current copy on the new server
- 1 backup copy on the old server
When the backup copy was restored it automatically updated my hostings company's DNS server which in turn updated every DNS server around the world so we ended up with duplicate entries for our website and depending on whether or not your ISP's DNS server was updated while this mistake was correctly you might of found yourself connecting to the backup copy of the website on the old server. I myself was connecting to the old server on the Uni network while on my own private network through my ISP I was connecting to the new server.
To summarize. If you are reading this message your ISP's DNS server has been updated with the correct single DNS entry for our website and no data has been lost apart from in those 40 minutes on Sunday when Crasp posted on the forums.
Also note that 99% of people should now be able to view this message as most DNS servers update at least once in 24 hours. Some may take longer though and for now there is nothing I can do until your ISP automatically updates your DNS server. This should be complete today in most cases.
OK problems sorted, stress over
