The site suffered from a long outage this morning due to a database problem with the hosting provider. The MySQL 4.0.x database that was powering most of the site has disappeared from the hosting machines, and I get a “Can’t read dir of ‘./ databasename / (Errno 12)’ when trying to log into the database. To make matters worse, as of yet I haven’t received any assurances that makes me think they know what they are doing.

When I contacted their support email address, I got a very cheerful and totally useless set of responses. I had included the full error codes from the MySQL client, and the website address for the photoblog of this site. After a few emails that were of little help, I went ahead and reloaded all the tables from my nightly backup scripts into the MySQL 5 database needed for the WordPress 2.9 upgrade, and made all the configuration changes to have the installs point at the correct database. I had to then go in and fix all my backup scripts to make sure they were pulling the right data to the right places.

As I finished this, the tech emailed me and told me that the site was working fine for him, and if I would be nice enough to flush my DNS cache, it would probably work for me. As if this was the problem all along. I guess the following wasn’t clear enough:

How do I get past the error: “#12 – Can’t read dir of ‘./databasename/’ (Errcode: 12)”. I don’t think I have access to the filesystem where

the database lives.

The response to my repeated questions about what went wrong:

With regards to what happen, we do not have access with your logs as a part of your security. What is more important to us is to see your website running smoothly now. In case this issue will occur again, we will be forwarding it to our administrators for further investigation.

Yeah, no thanks to your keen support skills. The problem wasn’t solved in any way. The problem was avoided by restoring the data from a backup to a different database. To add further insult to injury, I can’t find any other contact information on the 1and1 site, other than an 800 number for customer support. I’ll be calling them tonight and trying to work my way up to some form of administrator. Without some kind of response on what happened to the filesystem holding my database, I’m going to have to start looking for another hosting provider.

Any suggestions?