By Chris Lahey
Saturday, August 30, 2008
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I had a rather frustrating experience today that was worth mentioning.
At Station Four, we deal with a number of website hosting companies. Some are better than others, but for the most part, they are all the same. I'll take a moment here and describe a scenario that, in all my years or development, has happend more times than I can remember. Seeing as how we do almost all of our work from scratch, we often have a database driven application that we have running on our servers during development. When it comes time to launch, depending on the client's preferences, we begin to push the code and the database to the preferred production servers.
Today, we began to launch a website for one of our clients. I logged in to their Network Solutions control panel and began mucking around. Got an FTP account set up, created a MS SQL database and all was cruisin' along. That is, until I tried to restore the data in the freshly created database on the production server with a backup copy of the existing database on our development server. There was no way to perform this action. I Googled til the end of the earth, searched the FAQ's, and finally broke down and called the help center.
Long story short, after 45 minutes, talking to 4 different people, getting disconnected, waiting on hold, and generally getting pissed off, I was finally able to get them to understand what I wanted to accomplish. I had to FTP a backup file of my database to the web server (mind you the database server is on a completely different machine). The support person then downloaded my database file from the website directory and forwarded a help ticket to engineering to have them put the file in the proper location so that I can actually perfrom the database restoration using Enterprise Manager.
It blew my mind that there was no way to push my schema and data to the production database server. And to top it all off, the outstanding lack of knowledge of the support staff was so extensive that I began to think that I was mildly retarded.
So, here I am at 8pm, still no word from Network Solutions as to the results of this escapade and I have a website that needs to be up and running for a big marketing push by Monday. Needless to say, we will be moving 5 websites from Network Solutions to our own hosting account here shortly.