Hello Winston,
Thank you for reaching back out to us. We sincerely apologize for the troubles that you have been experiencing with your forum. We attempted to call the number on file, and were told you were not available.
When we began our investigation on the 20th it was unclear as to the scope of your problems beyond the error message you were receiving inside your control panel, and the crashed tables.
By the time we started looking into the matter on the 20th there were no crashed tables and the forum appeared to be functioning as it should when we visited
http://www.happierabroad.com/forum/. We do truly regret that tables crashed leading to the loss of content. It is tragic to have lost the data you and your visitors had put into the site.
It appears that your server is not currently configured to make backups. You or your administrator might have chosen to do this due to the lack of space on your drive, which is understandable, however, does leave your sites to this type of risk.
The crashed tables were most likely precipitated by the heavy server load caused by the increase in traffic you have been receiving as of late. We actually noticed really heavy server loads during our investigation. Having been able to monitor your server during this heavy load, we were able to see the same thing that was reported in our last email to you.
You can see an example of your server's heavy loads from today below:
Sep 20 (UTC) runq-sz plist-sz ldavg-1 ldavg-5 ldavg-15
10:10:15 AM 379 1211 400.04 341.91 214.05
10:20:07 AM 407 1045 403.36 395.73 303.37
10:30:05 AM 380 1202 400.98 408.51 354.46
10:40:04 AM 402 1220 408.10 410.69 381.83
10:50:06 AM 417 1050 397.55 405.69 393.50
11:00:05 AM 378 1203 399.75 333.34 339.02
11:10:07 AM 296 1180 408.75 395.73 369.91
11:20:08 AM 334 1216 399.81 390.75 379.24
11:30:03 AM 415 1052 411.46 408.97 394.52
11:40:23 AM 348 1212 403.19 404.69 398.78
11:50:06 AM 217 1232 409.11 404.19 400.63
12:00:01 PM 8 426 205.68 352.08 385.23
The site was receiving thousands of hits to your PHP service, primarily from IP's beginning in 159.138.*, which comes from what appears to be a Huawei hosting company. We blackholed this IP range on your server for a period of time to allow for the server load to go down. The server returned to normal levels though it did cause some for your tables to crash again, which have since been repaired.
We removed the blackhole in the event that you are expecting this traffic from these ranges of IP's. If you feel this traffic to be malicious in nature you can request that we block the IP range, or additionally you can also blackhole the IP range by running the following command as the root user:
root@server.happierabroad.com [~]# ip route add blackhole 159.138.0.0/16
As you mentioned in your recent contact with us you are looking to restore your database from a backup. As you or your administrator had the backups disabled, there are no server generated backups to restore from.
If you have any manually created backups to restore from please let us know right away and we would be more than happy to assist you in getting your database backup restored.
Going Forward we strongly urge you to either add additional storage to be mounted to /backup so that you can start utilizing the automatic backups provided by your server's cPanel software -or- manually backup your databases and files periodically, downloading them to a local location.
You can easily download a backup of your databases from within your control panel:
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If you do decide to purchase additional storage you can enable your backups from within your WHM panel:
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Once enabled to can set your configuration:
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We have scoured through your server to find any random backup you might had made at some point prior to the table crash. We were unable to find any to speak of. Again, in the event you have your own backup we would love to help you in any way we can to help you restore your database.
In the meantime, please feel free to contact us if there are any additional questions or concerns There is also a survey at the bottom of the email.
Regards,
Richie J.