Eek! Website trouble

[silverlining]

Okay, I have a problem...I have a forum and a blog which both use MySql databases on my website. Earlier today they worked fine. At some point today they stopped working. I came home to discover that the databases are gone from my cpanel, as are the database user and such. I'm trying not to panic because I really don't want to lose my blog and forum. What could cause this? If I make new databases with the same name, will the forum and blog use the new ones? Could this be something that is due to the main server upgrading and that might just pass in a few hours? Help?

[silverlining]

NEver mind, it came back. Gave me a *** heartattack though. You can delete this, Kiri

[CharlieChomper]

When I read that first post just now I saw you mention the fact that they were undergoing major server upgrades which would explain what was going on as the servers, themselves, may likely have been offline at the time depending upon the upgrades they were doing (such as dealing with hardware, migrating over existing data to a new server, major operating system upgrades, etc.).

Typically, with some companies they may hold off until non-peak times to address things like this so as to minimize the issues for the users, but with companies who may have many hundreds or thousands of servers, that's not as feasible sometimes given just the volume of servers that may be involved, so they may be more likely to send off a notice as a warning to users in case of problems sort of thing.

I'm glad they were able to get everything back up, though.

[silverlining]

Actually, I said they might be doing upgrades. Didn't know for sure. They didn't send out a warning, annoyingly. The databases have been up temporarily from time to time, and then gone back down. According to the supportforum it's happening to a bunch of other people too who are all on the same server as me, so it has to be a server issue. So hopefully it should work out properly before too long.

[CharlieChomper]

Typically, databases that can be considered "heavyweights" in this realm (ie MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MSQL, Sybase, Informix/"Arrowhead", DB2, etc.) are not exactly known for being gentle on servers and can actually really tax them to the gills unless the server is more than capable of handling that load.

It sounds like either the company may have underestimated what the server may have been capable of in that respect based upon what you've said, mainly with resource management, and/or it may even be the case (as with any site) of where someone or multiple someone's are runnings things that may be further taxing things with the server (although, in the latter case, a sys admin should be able to spot that almost immediately, depending upon what tools they're relying upon or even just within the log files).

[silverlining]

Well, it's back to normal now! No word on the support forum about what happened, but since everything's fine and no data was lost, I don't really care
Thanks for the help though!