Forum Downtime

[andykirby]

Hi All,

We are back at last! I would just like to apologise for the forum being unavailable for most of yesterday. It shouldn't have happened but unfortunately it did and I sorry if it caused any inconvenience for anyone, particularly those trying to get support for their device.

The problem was caused because by an excessive amount of email being sent from our webserver, basically forum related emails from post approvals and account activations. Wednesday was the busiest day ever on the forum with around 25,000 page views and all the emails being sent out caused our hosting service (000webhost) to think that we were spamming and so they suspended our account without warning! I couldn't believe this so I quickly raised a ticket on their help desk to explain the situation. Unfortunately they did not respond and still haven't.

When I started this forum I could never have had anticipated how popular it would be so I initially set it up on 000webhost, a free hosting provider. About 2 weeks ago I realised we needed a better solution so I made plans to migrate to their premium hosting service Hosting24... but the suspension issue yesterday just ended up forcing me into doing it a lot sooner and under much more pressure than I would have liked!

This morning I finally got hold of some nice chaps at Hosting24 who managed to get access to our database and ftp on 000webhost despite the suspension and we have now transferred everything over so we are up and running again but this time on a much better server with all the bells and whistles such as nightly backups and better bandwidth.

Anyway I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for their support in making this an awesome place to be we are now looking for moderators and admins so if you are interested in helping out please get in contact.

All the best,

Andy

[baronpork]

I cant seem to access this forum still. Only my phone and tablet can for some strange reason. When i try to access from desktop i get a generic login popup dialog which wont accept my logon.

[twjordo]

try a proxy server as that is what i am having to do for the time being to login... site is still under construction

i am using \"blue-proxy\" its free and does not get booted as much as some of the others i have tried

[EnvyThisStuff]

Every since you transferred the site, having problems connecting into it. Dunno if it's just an issue on my end or not, however, often clicking on links to maneuver through this site end up dead. And since yesterday I could not get in at all for about the previous 12 hours.

[roelfrenkema]

Only way to reach Riko now is through proxy. Using TOR currently to avoid the problem.

[Tatanko]

I've been having lots of issues loading the site as well. Some days this week for nearly the entire day the site appears to be completely down for me, but will eventually load if I try it like 12 hours later. Honestly, it seems like it's down more than it is up. I'm not trying to criticize anyone in particular here, just saying it would be nice if the site were able to be accessed "whenever" and not just sometimes. It didn't used to be this way... why the sudden change?

[andykirby]

Yes I understand what you are saying guys, this wednesday there was a massive DDos attack on the site which brought the site down for practically a whole day because the host started blocking IP's. I was on at them all day and then finally they took action and removed the block.

At other times I know at times the site is flakey, im not 100% sure why this is at the moment, all I can put it down to is an inadequate host and the fact that we are running on a shared platform.
I am looking into the options because we really need a stable platform, we are now getting over 30,000 page views per day so it is turning into a priority.

In the meanwhile please bear with us while we come to a solution.

[Tatanko]

Thanks for the effort, andy. I'm still having intermittent issues accessing the site, particularly during the day (GMT-5 for me). Hopefully you can work something out to get more bandwidth, or a more reliable host, or whatever it is that needs to be done to provide a consistent experience. This is a great little community you've started and I'm sure I speak for plenty of members when I say we will support you if we reasonably can. The ads on the site right now are fairly minimal, have you looked into bringing in a wider variety of them or anything? Maybe you could set up a PayPal and ask for donations?