Hi all.
Obviously I'm not going to go into details with our agreements with our ISP, but I'll just say we're not happy, and I've spent the last 2 days working on an alternate site/ISP provider (it'll still be monkey butt ugly, but at least it'll work).
So here's what happened in a nutshell;
Monday morning (about 12:30-1:00am) the site died.
There was thought it was a DNS issue, our hoster said that was the case since we couldn't ping/tracert an entire block of IP's to them.
Lots of yelling and screaming and gnashing of teeth at them while they shrugged their shoulders and pointed at Road Runner as the problem (DNS bit).
Thursday, more yelling and screaming, they _finally_ walked over and took a physical look at the machine only to discover it was dead. Totally dead. Unlike Monday and Tuesday when we could still kinda get email. Nope toast.
Friday they finally get us on a new server... only to discover... yup, the Hard Drive was corrupted.
So it's been a fun weekend trying to salvage information off of the old drive (took priority), then trying to get all the base level software installed on the new server/hard drive (we won't discuss how long it took them to do that), and start tweaking things out.
Now this would have gone a lot fast, but I myself, have been unable to access anything to make changes until yesterday on the old site... and then more today... again, due to 'issues' with our hoster.
As to a backup, well, they don't offer that service without paying an arm, a leg, a couple of torso's etc... And our most recent backup of information didn't cover the entire site, only the critical stuff (store information) and that's... well see 2 paragraphs below.
Now it looks like we're going to be back up here soonish, but don't count on your forum ID's being intact, in fact, let me say now, you'll need to recreate them (That way if by some freakin miracle we can recover the SQL DB's from the HD everyone is happ...ier...)...
As to the store, yes, we have a backup copy of all that information. The problem is the format isn't set up for a 'quick sql import'... which means either converting all those order (and users before the orders and the product listings before the users) to an SQL statement to import (IF our store software will allow mass import of users and orders) which will be fun to make OR (and the option most likely that I'm dreading) manually entering every user and order that we've had since day one.
Go ahead, ask me if I'm happy.
The new ISP has a LOT more features and guarantee's 100% uptime, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited hard drivespace etc... (yes it's a legit deal, they have everything set up on a SAN) for FAR less than we're getting ho'd, er I ean paying now.
That will take me at least a few more days to get set up, and again, it ain't gonna be pretty, but it'll work (and the same issues with importing user/product/order information applies, but looks to be a LOT easier to import, at least I see _1_ way to do it, just gonna take some tweaking to get the fields to match)....
As for making the old/new sites work, we're all working on what we can as quickly as we can, wherever we can.
I'm sorry for everyone that's had to wait this out, but there's little we could do until friday/saturday and limited amounts until yesterday... I _hope_ we'll be back up and mostly functioning tonight (at least the forums)...
Thank you for your patience and understanding.
One tired, ****** off, frustrated monkey staff
let me say I'm really sorry to hear about it all. You guys and gals have my utmost sympathy and wishes for a speedy store and forum recovery.
