PhilD13

A few things I did and a few things I learned. I have a reseller account with a few clients. I found out about the outage about 10 minutes after it happened. but it was about 30 minutes before I could verify my sites were truly offline. I think by that time or soon after I received an email from Mike about the issue. The first suggestion I made to one of my clients was to change what email forwarding to their domain was being done over to their Gmail account. While inconvenient and as the outage went on, they did have some mail bounce they were able to continue to accept and service orders as their main site is not hosted by MDD. They were very grateful for the suggestion even though their secondary domain hosted on MDD was down. Second thing I did was I informed my other clients that there would be an extended outage of their websites as there was an issue in the data center hosting them and I would keep them updated as to when I thought the outage would be over. The third thing was verify how new the offline backups that I auto generate and auto download and keep of the site files and databases for each client, A few days old and sites don't change much. Good there but I was not doing cpanel full backups so no email backed up. My bad there, never thought about it. Next I waited and monitored until late Friday evening to see if things would recover. When nothing had recovered after several hours, I sent a trouble ticket asking if any servers were still operational and if the outage would go past Noon on Saturday. VPS servers were operational and I could get an account on one to restore the sites if I wanted. Mike thought it would be fine by early morning. This was before they knew the data arrays were corrupted and could not be recovered. Saturday noon came and went and talk was not good about the situation. I informed my clients and asked if they were good to wait until the servers were restored from backups which could be Tuesday or Wednesday, or if they wanted me to move their sites temporarily They elected to just wait and those domains were not likely to miss any emails. A few things I learned that might help others in the future. I thought I was prepared, as I have in the past had hosts disappear in the night, owner die, etc., but learned I was not fully prepared to recover all data. I need to make sure I have email backed up and a full cpanel copy in addition to site and database copies that I already do. I was much better off than those who had stored clients backups online, did not have current ones or any. No matter how good the host service, how big (or small), how much trust there is, how good their customer service is, always be prepared to have all of your data and email or a customers data and email lost in an instant. Head the "you are responsible for all data, and your own backups, we are not responsible for lost data" that every host posts. Don't wait forever to inform your customers and be honest with them about the issue. This I already know from my primary job. Whatever the problem it will take at least 4 times as long to fix than what is first thought. Have a plan to bring your clients websites back online quickly if the outage will be extended even if it costs you money in the short term. Send a follow up letter summarizing the outage, and what you will or can do better in the future to prevent extended downtime in the future.

command line commands generally don't ask are you sure. If you have the authority to run the command it executes immediately.

While I don't use and have never installed XenForo forum, it looks fairly standard in requirements: PHP 5.2.11 or newer is required PHP must not be running in safe_mode PHP extension MySQLi PHP extension Iconv PHP extension Ctype PHP extension GD JPEG support for GD PHP extension PCRE (preg_replace) PHP extension SPL (SPL_autoload_register) PHP extension JSON PHP extensions for XML handling (DOM and SimpleXML) You can always run their script to check https://xenforo.com/xenforo-requirements-test.zip To use the script, unzip the package and upload xenforo_requirements.php to your server in any web-viewable location. Then direct your browser to the URL that corresponds with that location. Once you have checked the results from the script, it is recommended that you remove the file. I tested my mddhosting install and the script says that the server meets the requirements of the program.

I would agree. Their support is really good and have been a great help to me also.

Looks like the data center needs to upstream the issue of blocking to their carriers and also move the client(s) that have the issue recurring out of the main datacenter.

I don't use Wordpress but the following should work. You could take a look at this link. It has some nice photos showing how to change the username (not user id) in various ways. http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-change-your-wordpress-username/ I think the only way to change the actual admin user id without breaking associations to the admin account would be to follow the "Method 1 Create a new user and delete the old one" from the link above. When deleting the existing admin account make sure that you click on ‘Attribute all content to:’ option before actually deleting the existing admin account! Before getting started, you should be able to change the current admin user email to a different valid email (either an existing one or a new one set up in cpanel for this purpose), then you can use the existing admin email for the new user. Or you can do the opposite and use a different valid email for the new user and once everything is completed, change the email to the desired admin email.