Stress

Even more hair-raising than biking in city traffic is transferring a database-driven website to a new hosting service. At least for me, since I don’t do this sort of thing every day.

It all started Tuesday, when the database server became unavailable. Again. On Wednesday I started researching hosting companies. On Thursday I signed up with one and started moving files, replicating databases, etc. On Friday I changed my domain’s DNS servers. The rest is cleanup and learning my way around the new host’s impressive array of management tools. And wouldn’t you know, it’s cheaper than the old host. This move was long overdue, actually, but I’m lazy and loyal and prone to stick with people until things get atrociously bad.

And somehow it all worked out. Well, not just somehow. The tools at the new provider are excellent. All I lost (I think) is a month’s worth of posts on my family forum—luckily November was a slow month. (I thought for sure I did a backup when the database came back online after Thanksgiving. Turns out the last backup I could find was when I upgraded WordPress at the end of October—drat! Silly me: I thought I could count on my hosting company to back up my databases so that my backups were just icing on the cake.) Maybe I’ll get those posts back, if my database at the old host ever comes back to life (my contract with them doesn’t run out for a while, so I should still have access). Or maybe I won’t. No big deal.

It wasn’t until yesterday that I realized I had been holding my breath or something for three days. A sort of constriction in my chest. Now I think I can relax. A bit. It is technology, after all. The minute you’re lulled into thinking you’ve got it under control … Pow! If it’s not a bad line of code or a hard drive that gives up the ghost, it’s a lightning-induced power surge or a cable that was taken out and reinserted one too many times, or any number of human-generated flubs or well-targeted “acts of God.”

Then again, what if all my silly little webs went down? I think the world would survive, and probably I would as well. I shudder to think what’s it’s like to be responsible for systems that lives depend on. Permanent thoracic constriction, no doubt. Or seventeen layers of redundancy. Or both.