E-commerce Outage Recovery in Under Two Hours

E-commerce Website Recovery: Back Online in Under Two Hours

When a client's e-commerce website suddenly went down on a weekday morning, their IT team discovered the cause – the cloud server's disk had completely filled up, bringing the site to a halt. To make matters worse, they couldn't even SSH into the AWS-hosted server to free up space, leaving them locked out with an offline website. They reached out to us urgently for help.

The Incident

The root partition was 100% full, largely due to massive PHP log files from their Magento application. With the disk completely full, the server couldn't function, and the client couldn't access it to resolve the issue. This is a common problem that can bring down critical systems, especially when log rotation isn't properly configured.

Incident Response

Within minutes, we jumped on a call with the client's IT administrator and began troubleshooting. Our first recovery attempt was to restore the latest AWS backup of the server, but that failed due to a permissions issue. We quickly pivoted to an alternate approach: spin up a new instance from a recent Amazon Machine Image (AMI) snapshot.

The initial AMI we tried was too recent – it inherited the full disk problem – so we rolled back a little further to the snapshot from two nights prior. This time, the restore was successful and we could connect to the server. We updated firewall rules to allow internal access to the new instance's IP and brought the recovered server online.

Once in, we immediately cleared the giant log files that had consumed the disk, eliminating over 20GB of junk data and freeing up space. By 11:36am AEST, less than two hours after the alarm was raised, the client's website was back up and running.

Outcome & Prevention

Beyond just fixing the outage, we treated this as a learning opportunity for resilience. We discussed future safeguards with the client, including improving monitoring and alerting. It turned out their AWS CloudWatch alerts hadn't been integrated to our helpdesk, so the impending disk issue wasn't flagged in time.

We recommended re-enabling our 24×7 monitoring or ensuring CloudWatch can create tickets and SMS alerts to catch issues proactively. We also advised restructuring the server's disk partitions – separating the operating system, application, and log storage – so that a single log growth can't cripple the entire system in the future.

The client was grateful for the speedy recovery and took on board the recommendations to avoid a repeat incident. This rapid response story highlights how a combination of cloud expertise and quick thinking enabled us to restore a mission-critical service with minimal downtime, while also strengthening the client's resilience going forward.

Key Takeaways

• Proactive Monitoring: CloudWatch alerts should be integrated with helpdesk systems to catch issues before they become outages
• Disk Partitioning: Separate OS, application, and log storage to prevent log growth from affecting critical systems
• Backup Strategy: Regular AMI snapshots provide quick recovery options, but test restore procedures to ensure they work
• Log Management: Implement proper log rotation and monitoring to prevent disk space issues

Ready to improve your disaster recovery capabilities? Contact Vee Tech to discuss proactive monitoring and backup strategies for your critical systems.