On October 21st and 22nd, 2008 Hosting Nation moved their servers to the Softlayer facility in Seattle. It’s handled via an internal transfer protocol that allows for lightning fast resolution, a process so seamless that it would hardly be noticed on the client side. The reason for the move was speed, by having servers in Seattle there are less ‘hops’ from the datacenter to the end user which result in much faster load times for websites and hosted applications.

On October 24th, we updated the nameservers to reflect the new Seattle location. We’re happy to report that the move was a huge success, and the nameserver records have been updated.

For clients that updated their websites during this time, possible effects of the transfer are listed below.

1) If you downloaded your email via a POP account, you may receive emails on October 23rd that you had already received on the 23rd. The reason for this is that your mail (in a POP account) gets downloaded to your local machine from the server. Normally, mail downloaded to your POP account would be removed from the server (unless otherwise specified). In this case, to ensure that all websites remained stable, files remained on our servers in Dallas while we moved copies of all files to Seattle. So anything downloaded would still have been copied, and would be downloaded again by your POP client.

2) Content that was created and uploaded to your hosting space on the 22nd went to our servers in Dallas. It’s possible that that same content didn’t get moved over to the servers in Seattle, depending on when you uploaded the content. Example: You wrote a page of content on the 22nd at 10:00 am. That content was uploaded to the server in Dallas. Your files, email and databases were moved at 9:00 am to the servers in Seattle, but your site was still being served from the Datacenter in Dallas (a symptom of waiting to update the nameservers). On the 23rd, the nameservers were switched over, but no transactions or updates that occurred on the 22nd would be reflected, as they updated to the servers in Dallas. As a result, any updates or transactions would appear to be missing.

3) Transactions occurred on your e-commerce site after your files were moved to Seattle, but before the nameserver update. The copy of your database in Dallas would have recorded the transactions, but would not be reflected in your transaction reports – as the transaction is recorded only on the files in Dallas, not the copies in Seattle.

The good news is that nothing is actually lost. See, all the transactions and updates happened, they just happened in a different place at a time where your files in Seattle were dormant. As soon as the files in Seattle were made active, they reflect all updates and transactions that occurred up to the point just before they were moved. Randy, our system manager, is repairing the issue by ensuring that all databases living in Seattle have the transactional data that occurred up to the point of the switch.

We still have all the data in Dallas, as all updates were still being recorded right up to the point where we threw the switch. If you entered content or recorded a transaction on the 22nd, and you are not seeing it reflected on your website, please let us know immediately so we can resolve any issues. Contact support@hosting-nation.com for assistance, or use our support ticket system at http://support.hosting-nation.net to submit a request for assistance.