Sorry for the downtime

**Jason** · #1 05-19-2008, 12:23 PM

Just thought I should outline the problems we encountered over the last couple of days and what we are doing to avoid them in the future.

On the 14th, I received an email from our Hosting provider that there was a problem with the motherboard on the server we were currently hosted on so they would have to transfer us to another server. They stated that the move would happen the next day between 9 and 10. We would be down 5-10 minutes and it would not affect our IPs. So that evening I took a backup of the site as the one I had was from a couple days before.

The next day came and went and I thought everything had gone smoothly with the transfer. As it turned out, they encountered a problem and were not able to do the transfer till the 16th.

As you can probably guess, the move did not go a smoothly as they had lead me to believe. Not only did we lose our IP address, the backup they had taken was corrupt and while it looked like the image restored fine, it was incomplete and kept failing.

I opened a couple support tickets when I realized that there were problems, but it was already too late as they had removed the server and shipped it out for warranty. There was no way to make another backup, so I was forced to recover from the backup I had made on the 14th. Which is why we lost some post and maybe some new members as well. For that I am very sorry.

In order to prevent a similar problem in the future, we will be looking for another host as I have lost faith in our current host. I would rather have the site up and active then receive credit due to the downtime. I will also automate the downloading of the backups so that they are daily instead of weekly since that would have reduced the amount of posts that were lost. Hopefully we will not encounter a similar problem in the future, but if we do, we will be better prepared. Thanks for your understanding while we sorted out the problems. We will do better in the future.

Sincerely,
Jason

**dansls1** · #2 05-19-2008, 12:37 PM

Thanks for update and thanks for everything you do to make this site available to us!

**GreMir** · #3 05-19-2008, 12:41 PM

Thanks for the info but the greatest thanks are for getting the forum back up.

**whulsey** · #4 05-19-2008, 12:54 PM

Wow, I wasn't wonder what was going on. Was having serious withdrawal pains already. Thanks for being back.

**bclemens** · #5 05-19-2008, 01:28 PM

Thanks, Jason- I figured it was some kind of massive server failure when I saw over the weekend that the domain wasn't even getting resolved . Glad you're back in whatever permutation! No harm done here

Bruce

Zathros · #6 05-19-2008, 01:30 PM

It was almost like the world stopped spinning, virtually world that is. I feel very lucky to be a member of this forum and I know that I speak for all here. Thanks for the hard work you put into it.

**Gil** · #7 05-19-2008, 01:34 PM

Hi Jason,

Glad the site's backup with as little damage as there was.

+Gil

**Don Boose** · #8 05-19-2008, 01:44 PM

Many thanks for the explanation, Jason, and many thanks for the work you do to keep this wonderful forum operating.

It is a real joy to have a circle of talented and good natured friends who share many of the same avocations and also have enough diversity to make life perpetually interesting.

Don

**SCEtoAUX** · #9 05-19-2008, 01:59 PM

Thanks for the info. This place is starting to grow on me.

**Thomas Meek** · #10 05-19-2008, 04:15 PM

Thank you, Jason for the explanation of the problems and their resolution.

I wish you could have heard my sigh of relief when I clicked on the papermodelers.com bookmark this afternoon and got the opening page instead of that cursed error message.

Do I need to add that I missed the website?

Thanks for all the work you do, albeit most of it is invisible.

Thomas