Part of our service offerings is management of hosted accounts.  Yesterday a potential customer contacted us and said that they recently switched from one hosting provider to another.  Apparently all of the files had been copied using FTP, but they neglected to export the MySQL databases before making the switch.

Very fortunately, they had not yet canceled their service with the original hosting provider, but very unfortunately the reason they were switching was because their original hosting provider was basically going out of business and it is not possible to contact them.  When they changed the name servers, they did not write down what they were originally.

So, what do you do?  You cannot connect to the old server because the client doesn’t know what the IP address was.  You can’t do an NSLOOKUP because the customer doesn’t know what the DNS servers were.  We even called their domain registrar to see if they kept a history of changes made so maybe they could tell us what the name servers were before the change.  They did not.  While this is a minor case, it is still a good example of the necessity of good documentation.  Had we made the change, I know that we would have the information we needed to connect to the old server again.

This particular case worked out because we were eventually able to find some other domains that used the same hosting provider and then lookup their nameservers and eventually guess the correct nameserver (there were many), do our NSLOOKUP queries, get the IP address, and export the databases to the new hosting account.

The customer is very happy to be back in business and now understands the importance of documentation.  We have a new customer who has said they never again want to have such problems so they will be calling us for any changes they need to make in the future.  They are also interested in quite a few of our other services so everyone wins!

-Zachary M. Morvik