Derek Bodner’s Blog

I’ve spent some time in the Web Hosting Industry, both running my own (small) operation, then working for two years for HostMySite. During this time, I’ve come to frequent various message boards, as I enjoy the industry as a whole. I still browse and take part in these forums, even though I’m not currently actively involved in the industry (except as a client).

However, these forums sometimes scares me. This is a post I saw from the owner of a Web Hosting company that offers managed dedicated servers. Who knows the size of their operation (I had never heard of them before today), but just the fact that someone may fall into the trap of buying a dedicated server and expecting support from them scares me. I saw a thread titled “Large MySQL Migration”. So I click, expecting multi-gig databases, high traffic databases, migrating a replicated setup. Something of the sort. I click on the thread, and here’s his question:

I need to migrate a MySQL DB, in the past I have just created an SQL file and used that method (sometimes having to split the SQL file up) but now the DB is about 50 meg and 733,233 records.

Seriously? A whole 50 megs? That might take you a whole two commands and 30 seconds to complete.

No doubt he had probably only ever used phpMyAdmin, hence his comment about splitting up the files.

It’s irresponsible to provide managed services if your level of competence is that low. You can’t support something you don’t know, and please don’t try to trick people into thinking you can.