Roberta @ Grassfrog?????

Has anyone had any contact with Roberta lately? I sent a couple of emails to her today on some issues and haven’t heard back. Thanks.

I heard from a few other inspectors that one or two of their servers went down and are being upgraded to new ones so I’m sure they’re going crazy transferring files over. Server problems are never fun and a good way to drive yourself crazy. Check out http://grassfrog.blogspot.com/ for her latest updates.

Thanks Dom! Good info. My site has lost quite a bit of info… D’oh!

I need some things changed on my site too. I left her a voice last night and she returned my call today and she said will get to me in two or three days. She still has inspectors that have no site at all up. It appears the company that she has her servers with really screwed some things up, but I know Roberta will make things right whether it is her fault or not.

She said that she will have to rebuild most of my site too. Oh well, I wanted to make some changes to my site anyway.

I just hope they can restore mine to what is was a couple of weeks ago. At least fix my contact form:-(

She said that she stored some backups of my website on her server but they are about a year old. She has also saved several of my pages from caches.

Oh boy! I hope you all had local backups.

:mrgreen::mrgreen::mrgreen::mrgreen:

Thanx Dom

Guys, jump on Google asap and type in site:www.yoursite.com so you can see Google’s cache (click the cache button next to each page) and copy your content to Word or another program. Get each back that isn’t a stock page so you have a copy before Google scans your site again and replaces it or removes it from their cache. I helped Russ Spriggs with this earlier and his site was scanned Friday before the cache so he was able to see his old content. Save any images too by right clicking on them and saving them to your hard drive.

Roberta uses The Planet for at least some of her servers which is a major data center but hardware failures will happen no matter what you do. I’ve had brand new hard drives fail the first day I put them into use!

http://www.nachi.org/forum/f60/my-grassfrog-home-inspection-website-down-43687/#post565786

In my personal opinion guys Roberta seems like a nice lady I’m sure however if she is not running her own servers I would seriously consider upgrading to a new host. Even with a server upgrade your site should not go down and if it did your site should not be displayed for the world to see all jacked up. If she has to spend days fixing your website she didn’t take the proper steps to have multiple backups and I highly advise all of you to log into your server once a week and back up your entire site to your own hard drive. All servers allow you to actually gain access. If she doesn’t this would be another reason why I would change host. Just my two cents my friends. Point is…

TAKE CONTROL of your own sites. I get hit everyday and calls are coming in alot more than when I first starting in St. Louis. I could not imagine being down for days or even 1 entire day. Unacceptable to me.

Bill is right - we do recommend that our clients do local backups of their websites in our terms of use, as that is the best way to ensure that the most recent copy of your website can be restored in the event of a service interruption.

As for site content, our data backup and retrieval policies are clearly posted on our terms of service (http://www.homeinspectionwebsite.com/terms.php). While there is nothing we can do about the corrupted database, affected clients who had local backups of their websites are getting theirs restored at no charge, and we are still working to restore current content from cached pages for all other clients.

Our technical team has been working hard to bring everyone back online to as current a state as possible. Thank you to everyone who has been patient through this process. We will be offering free search engine submission services to all affected clients once we are through this crisis.

Regards,

Roberta Dulay
Grassfrog Technologies LLC

Roberta,

I appreciate the services you offer and know from experience that you are doing everything in your power to rectify this situation as soon as possible. Thanks for all your hard work.

Thanks Mike. It’s been a stressful couple of days with our whole team working all hours to restore services. Everyone’s a bit tired & cranky but at least we’re almost there. Anyhow, just wanted to say that it’s customers like you (and Brian and David and Rich, and countless others who have shown unmitigated patience and support) that make the tough days more bearable.

If there is anything you need from me, let me know (I don’t check the boards that often, so the best thing is to email me as support@grassfrog.com).

cheers,

Roberta

Thanks for all that you do, Roberta!
Whenever you get totally caught back up, can you post us some information on how to back up our sites? It would be greatly appreciated.

As I’ve opined in the past. If you allow you’re website to be hostage to any developer or service provider you have only yourself to blame when the inevitable problem happens (Note this is a when and not if situation).

Right now I could restore my website myself to any version I’ve had for almost 3 years. Because I make backups every time there’s a change. I use GoDaddy for hosting but being able to restore my websites does not rely on them in any way. If they disappeared tomorrow I could reload my sites to a new server in minutes.

It’s easy to think it’s not a big deal. But a website or websites could represent an investment of thousands of dollars. So not having backups you control and not having access that you also control is similar to leaving a $10000 thermal camera on the seat of your unlocked truck. Sooner or later you will lose it.

Everyone should take the lesson and get control of your website right now. Download full backups and make hard copies (cd). If a developer or service provider controls your access then start the process to change that as well. You should have the master password and then give any developer access that you can revoke at any time. Not the other way around.

Dominic offered some backup advice…

I believe you can also right click on your site - veiw source and copy and paste the code.

Kudos to you, Dominic, for providing assistance (again) even for your competitors customers.

Any host should be doing backups daily. Some do it multiple times per day such as Dom. I know I’ve asked him and he stated his servers do automatic back ups every five mins. I have no clue how often Roberta has hers set up for maybe she will chime in. Point is when choosing a host ensure you inquire about their backup policy and make sure you back up your own files as well.

That will get you the code, however, the code points to files such as pictures, pdfs, java script files, etc. Also, using that method, you’d have to go through every single page of your site and copy the code. It’s much easier to find a host that gives you ftp access. That way you can simply drag all of the contents, files and all, in the correct structure, to a folder on your computer. From there, make a copy on an external hard drive, online backup and disk.