I woke up to New Year's day finding that the website was inaccessible, I spoke online to the poor outsourced chap that had to be working on New Year's day. He told me the DC crashed, I didn't ask him what the DC meant, it could be the Windows Domain Controller, or it could be the actual DNS controller that held my website's resolution records. But I left it at that and went about my business.

On Wednesday they posted on the site that the server holding this site had some hardware problems, and they needed 24 hours to fix it.

On Thursday I started getting a bit pissed that my site still wasn't up yet, they're lucky that I don't earn my meals from my blog or I'd be breathing down their necks like the other people that were on the same shared server.

On Friday morning, they posted on the support site that the primary AND secondary hard disks crashed, and the data was corrupted. They asked the customers to please restore the data from any previous backups in order to restore their sites.

My last backup was June 2007 when I upgraded the version of DasBlog on the server... I was shocked that half a year's posts would be missing because of this. I logged into the FTP server and I realised that the files were still there but their contents were totally messed up, looked like a RAID controller gone bad to me.

As I was griefing to a friend he asked me, don't I used Windows Live Writer for all my entries, doesn't that keep backups? I checked.. and sure enough.. EVERY post I made since Aug 2006 was backed up. Thank goodness!!! Kudos to the Live Writer team.

But it turns out I didn't need to do that. Cause the webhost managed to restore back my files to a backup that still contained my posts up till Dec 27 2007.

That's when I realised that www.marauderzstuff.com wasn't resolving to the web server, thinking it was because the NS server also went down I manually keyed in the IP and address info into my HOSTS file so it'd resolve on my end so I can continue with repairs.

I browsed to my site's default.aspx file and I was greeted by a 404 error, on a hunch I navigated to static HTML file hosted on the server, and it was viewable. I knew this symptom. Because the web server is running Windows Server 2003, ASP.NET 2.0 is initially disabled and must be manually enabled through the Web Server Extensions control panel.

I spent the better part of the afternoon ding donging configuration errors and rights issues with the webhosts before they finally got everything up and running.

Then I realized that theshow.marauderzstuff.com wasn't working resolving so I asked them to correct that as well.

That was restored on Friday night.

On Saturday morning I still realised I couldn't access my website cause www.marauderzstuff.com still wasn't resolving. But the webhost's support kept insisiting that they didn't change anything to my DNS records.

They even gave me a website to check my domain information and insisted that marauderzstuff.com's domain information is correct and I should just reawait DNS propogation.

I checked the site out, I fed it theshow.marauderzstuff.com, marauderzstuff.com and www.marauderzstuff.com. The first 2 were fine, the last one spat out a "Could not find an IP Address for this Domain Name" error message.

I replied to tech support about this matter and told them to fix this, in response they replied with a message asking me to check the screen shot of a search on their end, I think they wanted to confirm that indeed everything was fine and I was just overreacting. This is what they attached.

I guess whoever took the picture was already too exhausted and tired of handling all the angry customers who have been screaming at them due to the outage to see the error message staring right at them!

I pointed the fact out to them and they FINALLY fixed the problem and we're back up online!

I thanked the people for their efforts, but based on how they handled this situation I can't fully recommend them to my friends without reservation anymore.

What a way to start 2008 eh?