Case study · Care
Ten years of nothing going wrong.
PropertyTalk and PracticalMachinist have nothing in common except this: both have been maintained continuously for more than a decade, and neither has a disaster to describe.
Two communities
PracticalMachinist is one of the larger metalworking and manufacturing communities online. Its archive is a working reference for people who make things for a living.
PropertyTalk is a New Zealand property community. We have carried it from vBulletin 3.8 through to current vBulletin releases, and we advise the owners on their other properties as well as the forum.
Different subjects, different countries, different platforms in places. The work is the same.
What a decade of maintenance actually is
This is the part that never appears in a case study, because none of it makes a story:
- server moves, when a host stops being the right host;
- operating system upgrades, which are only routine if somebody schedules them before the old version stops receiving patches;
- PHP version jumps, which break old forum software in ways that have to be found and fixed first, on a copy;
- forum software upgrades, and the add-ons that do not survive them;
- backup verification, meaning restoring a backup somewhere safe to confirm it actually restores. An unverified backup is a belief, not a backup;
- spam and abuse handling as the tactics change;
- performance work as the archive grows, because a forum gets slower every year even when nothing changes;
- TLS certificates, DNS records and domain renewals, each of which takes the whole site down when it lapses.
And the incidents that never became outages, because somebody noticed a disk filling or a service failing before members did. There is no way to count those, which is the central difficulty in selling this work.
The result
Both communities are online, both have been throughout, and their archives go back further than the relationship does.
Set this against the WhiteBlaze recovery. That community lost everything and got most of it back, at considerable expense, after a period when nobody was watching the server. Recovery is the more impressive work. Nobody should want to buy it.
Nobody watching yours?
If you are not sure when your backups were last tested, that is usually the answer.