What our provider was thinking, nobody knows...

Our hosting company migrated our server. It took week, days and hours before our server completed its migration.¹.

— The timeline:

• The migration was initially scheduled to start on Wednesday, September 27th.
• We reached out to the hoster to ask for a detailed schedule and to ask which preparations we should take. We offered to take the server offline gracefully. We received multiple apologies for the long delays in bringing our server online again, before they realised they never took it offline in the first place.
• We got notified of a new real starting time: Saturday, September 30th.
• We were assured this new migration schedule would take a maximum of 48 hours.
• Our server was abrubtly taken offline on Friday, September 29th.
• The latest backup we have is of 16 hours before the server went offline.
• After 72 hours of migration we were told that it would take at maximum another 48 hours.
• The maximum 48 additional hours have turned into but nothing has changed.
• 6 times detailed status information was promised. We still haven't received any.
• They asked us to send our root server password in plain text through e-mail. This is not a joke.
• The server has still not arrived at the datacenter. We can only assume the move is done through horse and carriage.
• Update after 10 days: "The shipment company lost the pallet your server was on."
• The server suddenly came back online. No further communication from the hosting company.

^1.Sadly not much is known of the migration patterns of the Large Webservers (Boxorum Linus Magna). They are known to frequent cold and dark environments and can easily be found in such places. How exactly they manage to traverse the vast distances between these sparsely available nesting locations has been a mystery which only recently has begun to be unlocked through meticulous study of their signature droppings and by listening to the telltale soft pings they give off while exercising their mating rituals.