ds32 Stuff that I wanna write about

Shareworld has had more visitors today than it has in the last 30 days.

After our server was attacked by a Trojan last month – which was attacking other servers in the data centre – we had to completely rebuild it, this resulted in several days downtime and over a week of disruption.

Although we never managed to locate the source of the virus, we did manage to reload the server and restore the most recent backup – although it was a few days old.

The events had obviously done some damage as it took several weeks for our traffic to build up again. Hopefully all is resolved now.

It did teach us a few important lessons though – we have since removed all other domains from shareworlds server – making it easier to restore backups in the event of a problem.
We also run multiple backup schedules now – you really don’t want to be relying on one backup source – JUST IN CASE!!

Most importantly it taught us that a backup plan is no good unless it’s fully tested on a regular basis – when we went to restore our very latest backup, we found it was corrupt, as were the last few days backups – so if you are running any critical service, your backups need to be check regularly and your backup plan needs to be tested in a real scenario and on a regular basis.

I use htaccess regularly to redirect old urls to new and for removing pages that don’t exist etc. So much so that the htaccess file for Shareworld had grown to over 100kb! Part of this size was due to a past re-design where almost all of our pages had to be redirected.

I was once advised that these redirects should really be kept forever. However, I was fed up with the size of the htaccess file – considering this has to be accessed every time a page is loaded, thats quite a demand on the server.

So, I decided to check all the pages listed for Shareworld using “site:www.shareworld.co.uk” and found that a lot of the old pages I had redirected with htaccess (301) were no longer showing up in the list of pages indexed by Google – so I thought it would be safe to delete the redirects in question.

I have now managed to reduce my htaccess file from 100k down to 20k! Lets see if that makes any difference…

http://www.cw.com/ – Very very nice looking site, easy to use, well written… Shame it doesn’t validate!!