Hosting Autopsy
36 things that go wrong in ordinary ways, and the small checks that would have caught them.
The certificate that expired on a Friday evening
An online shop selling hand-made furniture ran for three years on a certificate bought once and renewed by hand each...
AutopsyThe migration that forgot the cron jobs
A small publishing company moved to a new host over a weekend. The work was done carefully: files copied, database...
AutopsyThe www that was not there
A consultancy launched a redesigned site and shared the address on a printed brochure as www.example-consulting.com ....
AutopsyThe plugin update that took down the store
A shop running WooCommerce had automatic updates switched on, which is usually a good default. One afternoon, a...
AutopsyThe backup that could not be restored
A hobbyist forum had a nightly backup running faithfully for over a year. Every morning the control panel showed a...
AutopsyThe contact form that blacklisted the server
A neighbourhood association had a contact form on its website. The form sent messages to the secretary using PHP's...
AutopsyThe redirect loop nobody could see
A developer put a site behind a CDN to speed it up and switched on the CDN's setting for "flexible" encryption, which...
AutopsyThe disk that filled up overnight
A VPS hosted four or five small sites without problems for two years. One morning all of them returned errors, and the...
AutopsyThe sitemap that listed forty thousand junk URLs
A furniture retailer added a filter system to its catalogue: colour, material, price band, size. Each combination...
AutopsyThe PHP upgrade that broke the checkout
A shop owner was told by the host that PHP 7.4 was reaching end of life and would be retired. She clicked the version...
AutopsyThe CDN that served one customer's basket to another
A boutique put its site behind a CDN and turned on the option to cache everything, including HTML. Speed tests jumped....
AutopsyThe robots.txt that told everyone to go away
While building a new site on a test address, the developer ticked the WordPress option that asks search engines not to...
AutopsyTwo nameservers, one provider, one bad afternoon
A small agency was proud of its redundancy: four nameservers listed for its domain, two on each side. What it had not...
AutopsyThe wildcard certificate renewal that broke the mail server
An organisation used one wildcard certificate for its website and also installed the same files on its mail server. The...
AutopsyThe launch-day database that ran out of connections
A local theatre put tickets for its autumn season on sale at noon and announced it on social media a day earlier. At...
AutopsyThe database backup left in the public folder
A freelancer made a quick database export before an update and saved it as backup.sql in the site's public folder...
AutopsyThe auto-reply that answered itself eleven thousand times
A company set up an out-of-office reply on a shared mailbox. Separately, a helpdesk system sent an automatic...
AutopsyThe contact form that mailed an expired domain
A small manufacturer's contact form sent enquiries to an address at a domain the owner had used years ago for a...
AutopsyThe scheduled job that ran twice
When an online business moved from one server to two, to be safe, it copied the whole server image. That image included...
AutopsyThe firewall rule that blocked the payment provider
After a burst of suspicious traffic, a developer added a rule that blocked all requests from addresses outside the...
AutopsyThe sale that started at the wrong hour
A retailer scheduled a flash sale for 9 a.m. The shop software was set to the store's local time. The server's clock...
AutopsyThe CAA record that blocked its own certificate
A security-minded administrator added a CAA record listing the one authority the company had used for years. It was a...
AutopsyThe redesign that lost its old addresses
A consultancy relaunched with new page names and a cleaner structure. The designer was proud that the new addresses...
AutopsyThe plugin that emailed every order to someone who had left
Years earlier, a shop's order notification plugin had been configured to send a copy of every order to the developer...
AutopsyThe image that cost a month's hosting
A photographer on a pay-by-usage cloud plan published a picture that was picked up by a popular forum. People embedded...
AutopsyThe autoscaler that scaled to meet the bots
A startup used auto-scaling so the site would handle spikes. During one weekend a scraper began requesting every page...
AutopsyThe HSTS setting that broke the intranet
After a security review, an administrator enabled HSTS on the company's main domain with the option that includes all...
AutopsyThe IPv6 record pointing at nothing
After moving to a new host, a nonprofit updated the A record and thought no more of it. An old AAAA record stayed in...
AutopsyThe mailbox that filled up and bounced the best client
A consultant used a single mailbox on her hosting plan for several years and never deleted anything. Attachments...
AutopsyThe certificate on one server, but not its twin
A company ran its site behind a load balancer with two identical web servers. When the certificate was renewed, the...
AutopsyThe domain contact who no longer worked there
A company wanted to transfer its domain to a new registrar. The registrar's confirmation email went to the technical...
AutopsyThe twenty-four hour TTL on the day the server died
A site's DNS records had a TTL of 86,400 seconds, a full day, set years ago by a default. One morning the server's disk...
AutopsyThe one-line .htaccess edit that took three sites down
An administrator added a redirect rule to a shared .htaccess file in a parent folder, which three sites inherited. The...
AutopsyThe staging site that emailed real customers
A developer copied a production database to a staging site to test a new order workflow. The copy contained real...
AutopsyThe forced HTTPS that locked out the admin
A site owner installed a plugin that forces HTTPS. He also had a server rule doing the same thing, and his hosting...
AutopsyThe upload folder that exceeded its quota in a night
A school's gallery plugin generated several resized copies of every uploaded photo. After a sports day, teachers...