On January 12, 2016, 20:24 GMT, Oral Ofori pinged me on Hangouts, saying TheAfricanDream.net is down. Down like how? How does it go down? Is it not supposed to be managed if being managed by a hosting manager? Isn’t Godaddy the host?
It was serious. The worse old error you don’t want to see on your WordPress installation was happening to me.
“Error establishing a database connection”
After learning it wasn’t the problem of inability to connect to the database, but rather, GoDaddy messing up, I quickly hit the web to learn if others are experiencing a similar issue. It was good to confirm if I’m not the only one probably hallucinating because I had too much Waakye to eat.
Oh, tons!
A visit to downdetector.com/status/go-daddy reveals we’re not the only victims. The complaints were rushing in every now and then.
We had 3 options at this point:
- Contact GoDaddy support and let them help us get it online.
- Wait till the site comes up on its own terms
- Switch to a different provider
As a DevOps, the only bullet point that made sense was the last – Switch! And in fact, it happened to be faster, predictable and within my controls.
The time I could spend pouring out my anger, frustration, and dissatisfaction with GoDaddy, I channeled that furiousness in switching to a self-hosted solution in less than 6 minutes.
Since we purchased theafricandream.net domain from GoDaddy, a bit had to change.
- Point domain to new IP and add related Nameservers
- Create new database, new WordPress instance and Nginx server block for theafricandream.net
- Update networking info in DigitalOcean instance to reflect domain
- Migrate database from Godaddy and import to WordPress via
wp dbof the WordPress CLI on the VPS - Moved the
wp-admin,wp-contentfolders from GoDaddy into VPS replacing already spun up running WordPress instance. - Activated a few plugins and opened the website to public again.
It never occurred to me it would come to the point of dropping GoDaddy, but for now, I’m glad I did.
All systems are operational and TheAfricanDream.net is back online and will be online for a very long time, hopefully.
Ping us should you experience any issues with TheAfricanDream.net and we’ll be happy to fix things as fast as we can.
