Thank you everyone for the kind words!
It has been a hellish couple of weeks. Configuring four new physical servers (and 40-ish customer vservers) in less than a week is seriously no fun. Especially if you procrastinate on doing your Christmas shopping with the intent of doing it during the same week...
Tonight, I recovered the very last of customer data from the servers. (Everyone but one customer was up a week ago, but one server with ONE customer without a backup somehow went AWOL when the server owner yanked them from the data center.) I don't think I'll ever get the entire story on what posessed this guy to silently close up shop, walk into the data center, and remove all his hardware. I'm just glad I was able to get him to plug servers into a DSL line for long enough to get everyone's data out. WHY it came to that is beyond me, when I could have moved everyone's vserver out with 12 hours notice.
There are a few silver linings - most people are now hosted on much better hardware and on better bandwidth. I got to do some kernel upgrades (I still have some to do). There had been some problems with DDOS against that provider - I hope to see fewer problems.
I also have some thinking to do about directions for Acorn Hosting. My TOS said that I don't do backups of customer data for a couple reasons, including difficulty of figuring out WHERE data is when everyone has root, but the biggest reason when I first started out was simply a price issue. Well, hard drives are cheaper now, bandwidth is cheap, and there are some economies in having more servers. I've also learned that people don't make backups, even when they know they should. (You know who you are.) So I'll be doing some thinking about my recovery plan for a disaster of the every-server-in-the-datacenter-suddenly-vanishes flavor.
I also have some thinking to do about how to better support my non-developer/hobbyist customers. Recently I've had more and more folks hire someone to set up their openACS site, but some of those sites are ending up somewhat orphaned after the developer is done rolling out the site. There's a reason that the *only* AcornHosting plan is called the "developer's deal" - there was an assumption that the customer could handle their own website maintenance. It seems to be time for another plan choice, with some more support and clearer expectations included.
Well, I've gone on long enough - just wanted to update the thread a bit with what had gone on.
Happy new year, everyone!
