This is an informational bulletin on the status of the LBB webserver and wordpress blog.
Laguna Beach Bikini was offline this morning. Once again it was due to a corrupted mySQL database. I wrote about how to fix this in the article What To Do When Your Wordpress Blog Vanishes. The last time it was offline was back on February 5, 2010, over 6 months ago.
In this case, the wp_options table was marked “In-Use”. Also many of the tables had very high overhead. There were even a few tables with 0 records that had 347,000 of overhead. That’s a lot of overhead for empty tables! I repaired the table that was “In-Use” and the blog was immediately back on line. Then I repaired the tables with overhead one by one. When I finished, no tables had overhead. I’ll probably check tomorrow to see if any table has growing overhead.
Comments Off, Yet Still Spam
If you recall, we turned off comments just in case bad comments were causing the database corruption. But apparently, even with comments turned off the database can get corrupted. However, the last time it got corrupted was about 6 months ago, so with comments off it happens less frequently. Strangely, even with comments off our spam filter still catches the occasional spam comment. Some spammers must know how to add comments even when comments are turned off in the wordpress control panels.
Importance of Doing Regular Backups
This illustrates how important it is to have a recent backup of the mySQL database. In fact, my recommendation is to keep periodic backups forever so you can see what the blog looked like on some previous date. Frequency of backup, whether weekly, daily, hourly just depends on how much recent updates you are willing to lose. Backup the mySQL at least once per week. For instance, every Sunday evening at 7PM.
See Backing yo Your Database in the Codex on wordpress.org.
BTW, back in March the database was 12.7 MB. Now it is 16.7 MB. So it grew by 4 MB in 5 months time.
