As you see, this site was hosted by MyExHost when I got myself entitled for a sponsorship program under iCalvyn. I believe most of you experience certain difficulties while trying to load this site for quite a number of times.

I do get fed up with my host sometimes for the inaccessibility of my site which happened so frequently (Robin is the one who always noticed that). And with the recent Hard Drive problems, many of the unlucky ones got affected. UncleSeng, Jeremy, GaTo and Clarence are now not DEAD! I know how you guys felt, we all felt like screwing our host.

On a brighter side, Daniel being the lucky one was able to revive his blog in a short while but with all previous posts gone. As much as I valued you, I would like to let you know what had actually happened. Skip this if you do not understand the technical jargons (I don’t understand them as well).

Email 1: IMMEDIATE HARD DRIVE Replacement on Gamma Server
13 June 2008 17:11

Dear MyExHost Solutions Users,

This error occured around few weeks. We tried our best to fix this up though, it looks like the Linux Kernel journal is no more allowing us to run this hard drive. We need to take the server down for a few hours to do the replacement and restore all data. We are expecting this process to be completed in less than 12 hours. Please note, if you have account on a different server, you shouldn’t face this error or you are not affected with this. Please also note, no data are lost, all are backed up and fine as it is.

Thanks for your patience in the matter.

Regards
SeaChen

That email was sent to me on a Friday 13. This morning when I woke up, my host sent another mail to me. Now, this is not a good news.

Email 2: File System Corruption on Gamma Server
14 June 2008 05:21

Dear MyExHost Users,

We are sorry to say that the file system of Gamma Server got fully corrupted because of a Journal crash. Our techs as well as the Datacenter techs tried their best to recover the data though, none of the data from the corrupted hard drives could recover. We are lucky that we had daily backups on our Lan server but the root problem is, we do not backup any of the configuration file or mysql databases offsite. We were backing them on the same server and having RAID to protect the data corruption. The file system corruption as well as the RAID fail have resulted these files to be lost. Right now, we have around 210GB of total files of the users. No Database or Cpanel informations are available in the server right now. We are trying to employ someone to create all the Active Gamma Server accounts and sends the account notification asap. If you need any of the files backup please contact the support immediately.

Sorry for the inconveniences, we know the hard drive failure was out of our hand, though matter related to backup techniques was a big fault. We have learned our lessons and going to configure the whole mysql server on a new node located under our Private LAN. We apologies again for the inconvenience as we can’t really do anything else other than that right now. In the meantime if someone have any full backup, you can restore it anytime by calling support.

Regards
SeaChen

What can I say? I accept this unfortunate incident and I forgive my host. We both learn our lessons, we both should have BACKUPs!

Time to remain cool. It is not the time to point fingers at anyone. I know the not so exciting experience you have had when trying to access danielliew.com.

Database all gone. Older posts have been laid to rest. All blogrolls have gone (lucky I subscribed to some of your feeds). Everything seemed so dead, I for once thought of giving up blogging as I received this devastating news from my hosting company that something bad happened had occured.

Considering that I shall not give up, I decided to build up this site again. I will not cease to continue writing because I know you have had a great stay here, at least some of my readers told me so. Their words are like honey and milk to me, sweet but not deceiving.

If you could still recall a post titled “it is not important after all“, I do mean what I said. All this is not important now, it is time to start afresh. As engineers are good in building and restructuring things, so shall I.

“What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

I hope you are kind enough do drop your blog address in my comment section so that I can keep in touch with you.

Okay, it all happened on a Friday 13! What a coincidence?!

Note: Posts between the period of April 28 to June 10 has been retrieved. Guess what? This is my first post written on June 14, 2008 although this domain was officially registered on April 29, 2008.