Monday, March 22, 2010

db4free.net outage

Here is in brief what's going on.

Last Friday (CET), big hardware troubles started on the server which db4free.net runs on. The server was unavailable and I didn't manage to start it up again by myself. I files a support ticked to my server provider, and by Saturday afternoon, the server was accessible again. Everything seemed to look fine, but Sunday, shortly after midnight, the same troubles started again.

My server provider gave me a new server, and thankfully, managed to get the old server to start up again. I backed up the user databases and copied them to the new server, so no - or at least almost no - data should be lost.

It will take me some time to migrate the entire service to the new server, so please be patient. I also want to use this "opportunity" to start offering MySQL 5.5, so my plan is to make the old server available on a different port, and start the entire service over on a fresh and clean MySQL 5.5 instance. This will mean that users will have access to their data (probably for the next 2 months or so, until I shut down the MySQL 5.1 server), but in order to use the new server, everybody will have to register a new account again. These are my current plans, and I hope to have the new db4free.net fully up again by upcoming Friday (March 26).

Please apologize the inconveniences. However, it's again a good opportunity to remember that db4free.net is a testing service with no warranties and that users should keep backups of all data they really need!

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the info :)

Unknown said...

Really happy for the DATA and for db4free.
Live Long And Prosper, good luck.

Anonymous said...

I follow you! Save my data!!! ;)

Anonymous said...

Thanks :D

Anonymous said...

I was worried thinking that was the end of my free database. Thanks for the info and the service.

Markus Popp said...

db4free.net is fully back :).

There was no update to MySQL 5.5 though. It turned out to be not stable enough, so I just put everything in place as it was before.

Enjoy! :)

Markus Popp said...

No plans to end the service :).

There may be some server changes from time to time ... as I will certainly try to update to 5.5 again later, for example. The purpose of db4free.net is still to test up-to-date or even future versions of MySQL. But it seems 5.5 is not ready for that yet.

Unknown said...

Its back online now, thanks.

Hey that is a good server provider you have there, they fixed your problem in no time, mind telling us who the provider is? I'm looking for a good host for a website I'm making.

Keep up the good work, since your website went down I tried every free DB hosting provider there is, none of them provided the quality of of work you have.

Markus Popp said...

db4free.net is hosted at easyspeedy.com, a Danish server provider.

Their support is much better than what I had experienced with other providers earlier. And they offer a fair amount of freedom, in terms of which Linux distribution to choose, and a server can be reinstalled with any of the offered Linux distributions at any time at no extra cost. Most other providers that I have seen charge extra for that.