Past week's server problems

Team Member Joined: 06 Jan 2002 Posts: 2564

I am posting an explanation of the past week's events, for those who have been wondering what happened:

Early in the morning on Thursday 26/08, the server which 4WebHelp was hosted on crashed. Unfortunately this crash was caused by a hard disk failure.
Later in the morning I found out about the issue. Since there was no possibility of working on restoring the server's hard disk until Tuesday 31/08 (30/08 was a bank holiday in the UK), 34SP created a new account for us on another server (Diamond, which you may be viewing this message on). However due to an unrelated problem, my daily automated database backups had not been running since early August. We therefore restored this backup anyway, and locked the forums to prevent posts disappearing when we restored a more recent copy of the database.
On Thursday 02/09 (today), the crashed server's contents were restored. A new account was created for us on the server where we should be remaining (Lothos). I restored the contents of the database from 26/08 to this account. This is the database which we are now using.
During DNS propagation, you may still be accessing our site through the old server (Diamond). However, after this propagation takes place, you will access the site through the new server (Lothos). You can also access the new server through http://www.4webhelpnet.34sp.com/ until propagation takes place.
Changes made to our forum database during the period 26/08 - 02/09 have not been taken into account. This includes private messages, changes to your profile, ad views (yes, you got extra ads for a week). Also, please note that accounts created during this period do not exist anymore. We apologise for the inconvenience, and request that you please register again.
I am taking steps to ensure that backups of our database are uploaded to multiple servers, so that if one of them fails the others will still work. (In this case the backups were being made to an account of ours on another 34SP server which was accidentally suspended in early August.)