Welll....Things have ended up taking a lot longer than planned, so sincere apologies again everyone. After spending weeks setting up the new server, and getting things very close indeed to being fully operational and ready to transfer BaO over, I figured the wise thing was to do a whole backup of the new vitually-fully configured server about 4 weeks ago.
The first backup failed overnight....I thought maybe there could have been a connection problem or something between my PC and the server so I tried again the next night.....Another failure for some reason. Then on opening my email on 9th June, I found that the the server company, 1and1, had disconnected the server from the internet and had said in the email that there was an "exploit" because of a large amount of data transfer. The email said that I had to use a fax to get them to reconnect the server. ....aaargh, the data tranfer was me trying to do a backup, not an exploit!
Faxes are one thing I really dislike. I haven't got a fax machine and refused to sign-up to another server company because of insistence on faxes to confirm the order...Finding somewhere to send a fax (a shop or library) means excessive site downtime caused by the hassle of getting to somewhere to send the fax anyway...plus passing personal info (including password info) to someone who I have no idea whether to trust or not.
Anyhow I immediately emailed 1and1 explaining that it wasn't an exploit, just me backing the server up....and explaining that I was very concerned about whether this would happen again when I do future backups. I explained I wasn't happy about their requirement of using faxes and gave them 24 hours to get things up and running, after which I advised if it wasn't reconnected I'd leave them. Still they insisted on the fax so, to save any future such problems and avoid downtime for BaO in the case of future silly action by 1and1, I decided that the long termm answer was to simply use a different server company.
Seeing as I've had to go over a lot of the setup stages again, all of this took things back by a few weeks....I'm now nearly up to the stage that I was at at the end of May (I've already done one successful large backup by the way without any such problems as I'd experienced with 1and1).
I'm still hoping to get everything set up and moved before The Half Blood Prince is released, so that there's any minor moving-to-new-server disruption after the release...it's going to be a very tight schedule (and I'm really not quite sure if I can get it done fast enough but you can be sure that I'm trying like crazy at the moment!) so many apologies if you've PM'd me or anything, and haven't received a reply yet. I'll try to reply as soon as I can once the server move is all over (and before if I possibly can, but can't honestly promise a reply before). Once the move is done, I should be able to be here more in general too.
Meanwhile I'd like to publicly say a huge and heartlfelt thanks to all the great Mods here who have been keeping things running brilliantly whilst I've been busy.
Although it's a different new server than originally intended, she's still called hoppy by the way.
