I have been speaking with our web space provider trying to work out what happened the other evening. And it may happen again over the next few days.  Take copies of what you post, and I will tale regular offsite backups

It appears that the web space provider company has restructured and servers like ours are with a new sister outfit - however, payment details and systems have not been transferred. ...

 
Our main (and now back office) hosting has been with UK2 for several decades - the Coffee Shop was added as a side-site onto our the real (physical) server for Well House Consultants hosted there.   A long relationship and a good support team.  When I retired from the hotel and training we transferred to a cloud server with the same company, based on such things having come in and being a much reduced (monthly) price.  Not so much that my/our traffic had gone down, but that technology had moved forward, and that the cloud server was/is cost effective.

UK2 has moved on too.   It's now "a THG Company" ... and about this time last year they switched from their own email systems to Stackmail which was not entirely smooth.

They (and by which I think I mean THG) has move the server side of the business to "THG Ingenuity Cloud Services".  Previously, we were set up with a monthly payment made automatically with two emails - "we will be charging you" and a few days later "we have successfully renewed".  Looking back, these emails were not received late in July; an email from Ingenuity saying "your server has been transferred to us" at about that time appears to have gone into / been lost in spam, and there may have been one from the original UK2 control panel too.

Domains and email continue at UK2, and indeed a couple of annual charges have come though on some of those so the UK2 account is still live.   However, I hadn't noticed the lack of invoice(s) or payment for the cloud server, and the other evening that resulted in the hosting service "freezing" the server so that it became a read-only computer - effectively offline and only accessible to me as webmaster via a secure shell at a different IP address to the one we normally use. I became aware of the problem within minutes with both reports from members and from the receptionist server which is hosted elsewhere.

The UK2 / support ticket system no longer offered me a "help with your cloud server" option but I did put in a ticket and  member of the team there did try and find a fix, but had to "escalate to the data centre team" and told me that "I would need to allow them time".  And on that unhappy note I slept a bit, having posted a status report on the receptionist server.   And at 06:00 in the morning, I found the server was back up, and switched the receptionist to start to forward requests again.   A message in my status box told me that I hadn't paid for the service, and suggested I sign up with the new company to clear my bill and have the service continue.

---

I worry about signing up base on an email from a company / setup I have not dealt with before - however, I was assured that this was not a genuine setup / transfer, all be it not cleverly done.  And attempts to login and register with the new company failed because their verification email - as far as I can tell - was so much like spam that it never reached me.  So - in limbo with a server (temporarily?) up and running again and with a threat of being lost again when my bill remained unpaid.

Wind on to yesterday, and a phone call from "number withheld" while waiting inline at the pickup point in a local fast food takeaway ... to ask what I was doing about sorting out the account; bad line, and I am very poor of hearing - but it struck me that this MIGHT be genuine for once, and I asked the guy to call me back half an hour later - and it was at that point that the story of what had been going on became clear.  It seems that the part of our UK2 account relating to hosting could be and was transferred, but the payment details could not be and needed re-registering ...

---

Long chat with the new hosting support person - now from Manchester rather than docklands, and an invoice to pay with an invoice address in New York rather than in the UK - though in pounds and with UK VAT, and a system that's running again as I write and post but which was down for some eight hours and without warning that reached me (you could argue I should have been on the ball and noticed the lack of a request to pay).    I think we're OK for a week or two and I'll check back now that alerted to see if and how it settles.

I am inclined to stick with the new company for now rather than move in knee-jerk reaction.  I do have backups so that I can get back to where we were via a server elsewhere should I need to; that could take 24 to 48 hours.    We are promised "the same price as you have been paying" but it is not the exact equivalent to the new product being offered by Ingenuity, and I enquired about resizing - could also be useful to up certain specs.   However, the new company seems to lack quite the flexibility that would have needed - "your could purchase a bare server" but that would take us back to where we were in terms of extra cost and extra management we no longer need.   I am taking a look at the medium to long term and will throw options into the mix with the moderator / admin team over coming days.  No panic, I don't think, in the short term - but a need to plan for medium and long term.

Management summary - the Coffee Shop servers are still running.  We need to look at clouds on the horizon - as always, considering the medium and longer term in the moving IT field to ensure we remain operational and able to respond to incidents and changes.