Coffeestops!

First of all, I would like to apologise for the down time of this site for the past few days. Due to my current on-going examination and short of time, I did not pay enough attention to the happenings of this site. So yeah, enough of the “Error connecting to database” message. The “data center” has given me an explanation on what actually happend behind the error. To the authors and visitors of this site, this is the mail I received in my inbox today:

According to the server report, Yesterday the server had a severe hard drive failure. We had the server partially down while data was moved to a new drive and the drive was installed. This caused several services to go down. We now believe that the hard drive was having motor issues and could have been causing apache and mysql to crash a lot over the last week or so. I would like to apologize for the trouble and understand the need for 100% uptime. Hardware problems do arise but we try to rectify them as soon as possible.  A hard drive replacement along with a recompile of apache and php have been performed. System diagnostics are currently in progress to prevent future issues.

To make things short, it was the MySQL database that went down. Wordpress requires MySQL database to keep running as all the posts and comments are stored in the database. That explains the message “Error connecting to database”. HTTP server was running fine when the site was down. In other words, if this is a simple HTML site, nothing is affected.

When Christopher texted me regarding the problem, I only realised that the site went down. When I got home and looked through the cPanel, to my surprise there was NO DATABASE. The Wordpress database was GONE! I was very shocked as there was no backup done before that and if the database really go K.O., that means that all the materials in this site are gone as well. After checking out other sites hosted by the same web hoster, I found out that they faced the same problem too. So it was obvious that the MySQL database service crashed. So there was nothing that I can do except to sleep and wait till the next day so that I can contact the web hoster.

Again, apology from me and the web hoster. To those who kept trying to access during the down time, sorry for the inconvenience caused. =(

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