Hello All

I recently had a major problem with an abusive database, (see previous post on subject )here:

http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/Forums/tabid/795/forumid/108/threadid/128576/scope/posts/Default.aspx

I am relieved to say that the site is now back up and running.  However, this would not have been possible without the invaluable expert help from John Mitchell (www.snapsis.com), who has helped me in every step of the way, by cleaning and restoring the database.  Thank you John.

The problem it seems was that my database had several concistancy errors and 'torn pages' (database term), thus causing files to become corrupted, fortunately the corruption seems to have occured mainly in my log files and as far as I am aware some data from my  text/html file (approx one or 2 day's work lost).  I have been working on this site for months, so it might have been much worse.

The probable cause was an overloaded, underpowered server, as 'CarlosRafi' pointed out in the previous post:

the server your site is on is shared with at least 1,410 other sites.  I say "at least" because those are all the sites on the same IP address, the server could have more addresses assigned to even more site

It seemed that the server may have had a runaway site or process and was just killing off indiscriminately until it eleminated the problem, or perhaps a faulty hard drive on the server causing database files stored on this server to become corrupt.

I have requested to my hosting provider to move my clean database to a server with less sites. However, I was not given a new server string to enter into my web.config file, which implies to me that they put my restored database back on the same old server (but I could be wrong).  However, upon checking the amount of IP address presently sharing the server, it now has 339 less thus currently totalling a meagre 1071. Perhaps the 339 missing IP addresses have been lucky and have since transfered to a new server, or they too have suffered similar catastrophic consequences. I may never know. 

Something to bear in mind when choosing 'shared value hosting'.

I feel a move to a new hosting provider coming on.  How are your servers John?

Regards

Lynn