Forum Updates

[Toff]

I think they actually fixed it for your arrival.

[iAmTubbie]

LOL toffy

[Toff]

Bad news, guys. There will be another downtime for a week or two. >:( Hope anyone reads this before this happens. The following is the story behind the latest big downtimes.

Downtime 1: The server my account was on died. The admins took a lot of time trying to recover the data, but couldn't. Luckily I had a backup, so I had to reregister and restore everything manually.
Downtime 2: The hoster decides to move some of the accounts (including mine) to a new and upgraded hardware. After the move (which lasted a week or so), then some problems arise. They finally solve them.
Downtime 3: A week after same problems reappear. They solve them again.
Upcoming downtime 4: The hosting software they use was unable to handle too many connections. They contacted the developers of the software, but they couldn't help either. This means that they have to move all the accounts that are on the new server back to the older one.
...No comments.

[Kamekku]

If you've got a backup of everything, why not just take your stuff and go with a different host? If they're moving back to the older server, that means they're probably going to move everything back to a newer server again after some point, which will be downtime number 5. We've always had problems since we moved over to this domain with lag and downtime and not being able to access the site consistently, so I'd just say go with someone else. Of course, it may not be that easy, but... yeah, those are my thoughts.

[Toff]

The problem is, ours is the best of the (semi-)free hosts, seen and tested them all. << I don't host anything that earns me money to pay monthly fee for a paid one. And forum hosting services suck because you can't install your own mods, can't update the forum engine as soon as the update is released (usually have to wait for months) and don't have access to the server, so backing up is either impossible or you have to pay for it. Our old forum was on a free forum hosting, the hosting died and the forum database died with it because I had no access to it. The only good thing about forum hosting services is the speed, but I prefer having full control since that incident, and it did save us a few times already.

[Toff]

Yay for a slight forum rollback.

The backup I had was more recent (July 14th), so I restored that one. The rollback is much slighter now and is pretty insignificant, I think. Is there something missing still?

Also, I think the big server migrations are now finished. They're not gonna resetup the new server as it seems they already resetup the old ones.

This is a brand new setup we're using and we're still tweaking somethings that may cause interruptions in service over the next few days. While we did a lot of testing before moving everyone, there is no good way to test what will happen when you have thousands of users and websites live on a system. In general people should notice a fairly large increase in speed.

Now that we have everyone moved we will continue to restore normal services such as Softaculous, Fantastico, etc... we will post another update in about a week to let everyone know how this new solution is going and where everything is at.

Thank you to everyone who stuck through the great migrations of 2010. We greatly appreciate the support.

[Kamekku]

The backup I had was more recent (July 14th), so I restored that one. The rollback is much slighter now and is pretty insignificant, I think. Is there something missing still?

Looks like everything's back, huzzah for Toff's good backup/admin skillz.

[Toff]

Some update from the staff:

Hi All,

The latest solution we have implemented has been a success so far. We could have not hoped for better results. It has been online for over 72 hours now and has had 100% uptime. We've had a few small things to tweak and may still have a few more but so far we're very happy with the results. We're also seeing over a 100% speed increase in page loading from before.

Let's hope it stays like that.

[Toff]

Our host made some modifications to their service. It should speed up the site a bit and stop spambots. Let's see how it goes. Tell me if it loads any faster for you.

[DARKS1M]

Still slow as balls for me unfortunately.