As mentioned in my Back Online post there is a long story to this why were offline for so long and here is the backstory on why.
In December 2020, GoDaddy.com, our then hosting provider moved our websites (I manage several including https://www.mclwestchester.org/) to a new updated server. In the process, they broke the hand written ASP (Active Server Pages) code that ran the site. On Sunday, 10 January 2021, I was able to fix the issues so that the site can once again be operable. However, the new server does not support several components that I built into the site to manage the backend. Instead of trying re-write thousands lines of code, I chose to delete the old site that has been in constant development for the past 20 years. I then moved to a new application called Word Press. As I develop these new sites, I am also learning the application at the same time.
May 2021
In May, we moved the hosting of this website from a Microsoft Windows based hosting platform to a Linux based hosting platform. This has significantly improved the performance of the site and has almost eliminated all of the technical issues on the backend that we were experiencing. Now that those issues have been resolved, we have been tweaking the backend operation of the site.
March 2022
During the month of March you may have encountered an error message like the one pictured below. The issue was easily reproduceable, however GoDaddy.com technical support during the course of the month was not able to correct the issue with their servers. It appeared that their hosting department and firewall security department could not communicate with each other
GoDaddy Error Message
The hosting department kept blaming bad requests from unknown sources as the cause. When they did that they would close the support ticket. On multiple occasions I had to reopen the support tickets and kept getting the same canned answers, with no resolution to the problem. After more than a month of going back and forth, I made the call to leave my long term hosting provider and move to a new provider, who was recommended by Word Press, the platform on which this web site is built on. On March 28, 2022 the move was executed. During this time, all of my domains were transferred from GoDaddy.com to BlueHost.com.
During the move both email and this web site were unavailable. The transfer was suggested that it could take anywhere from a few hours to 5-7 Days. Needless to say, it only took a few hours to complete the domain transfers. All email accounts were recreated (including reconfiguring desktops, laptops and mobile devices) by midnight. The Marine Corps League – Westchester County Detachment web site was backed up on the old provider and restored to the new server. There were some minor hiccups in the restoration. At the moment I am going through each page and ensuring everything is functioning as designed, and correcting any issues that were caused by the migration. This site is now being rebuilt from scratch. All old program and scripts that had been previously posted have been removed, as I deemed them outdated. Moving forward, I am going to start from scratch.
A special acknowledgment to iClyde, the plug-in developer from https://backupbliss.com/ who spent several hours remoting into my computer so that a good backup (Marine Corps League Westchester County Detachment of the site could be created. Due to the timeout errors, a regular backup could not be created.
To date 13 April 2022, with the new provider, Blue Host I am very satisfied with their pricing, service and their technical support. Their cPanel is slightly different that that of GoDaddy, but I am getting the hang of it.
