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This past weekend, my biggest fear came true.
Interbasket was caught in a major server problem at my web host on April 21st. All my files were corrupted along with the backup files for the site. The good news is that I have all the information outside of the forum (profiles, Olympics, index etc) backed-up on my home personal computer, the bad news is that ALL FORUM threads, posts, images, and member profiles were corrupted and have been lost forever.
Needless to say, I was and am still pretty devastated. I was on a shared server with other websites and am certain that many of them are just as angry with our webhost as I am.
In the mid-afternoon on Saturday, I attempted to log into IBN to find that IBN's forum link wasn’t working. I thought to myself “Now, what?!” as I have been less-than-pleased with my web host the last 10-12 months.
I then attempted IBN’s homepage and found that a general “No page is configured at this address” page… which set off a lot of alarms for me. Normally, I would find out the entire site was down because of bandwidth issues or a billing discrepancy, but to see an actual webpage parked where my homepage was normally sitting signified that this wasn't an ordinary problem – either my webhost hadn’t had the chance to restore the backups or there were no backups to restore.
I confirmed a day later that the latter was true. I spent the entire day trying to contact many members of the forum and trying to get them to spread the word. All the while, I was caught in-between anger and sadness trying to get ahold of anyone that I could yell at. Those threads and posts and member profiles were part of IBN history. To me, it was like losing precious photo albums in a house fire. It wasn’t so much the threads, so much as chronicling our history.
I knew I had no control over it and yelling at them wouldn't do any good (though I really really wanted to), so I started planning out what I needed to do to get the site back up and keep it consistently live.
I began to look at this as a new start. I’ve wanted to change web hosts for some time now, but was afraid to. Ironically, I was worried that in the transition from affordablehost.com to a more reputable one would cause IBN to lose/corrupt information.
The irony of this situation is not lost on me.
However, with this recent happening, I am happy to move on from affordablehost.com, it started as a small local company where one could contact Tina, the woman who started the site whenever there was a problem and she would take care of it (I had her cell phone number!).
Then in late 2005, affordablehost was bought out by a large Canadian web host and from there, my problems began – my site was brought down because they thought I hadn’t paid (I had in fact prepaid for two years), they brought down two of my other sites without contacting me, they had a couple minor outages, and now this, all in about 6-7 months.
So I’ve frantically moved on to a more reputable host and I am pretty excited about it because they offer so much more for about the same pricing. This unfortunate event also gave us the chance to upgrade the forum, it’s much more powerful and is a newer version of what we were running on the old forum.
I want to preserve as much as we can control, so any ideas would be greatly appreciated. One thing I can control is changing the time in which you registered, so re-register with IBN 3.0 and contact me if you remember when you first registered on IBN 1.0. (If you look at my profile I was able to change my registration to August 27th, 2003 when IBN first went live)
So if you are interested, PM Matt or I with your old username (if different), when you registered on the old forum and one of us will change it over the next few weeeks.
I will be spending the next few weeks trying to get this new product off the ground and even though the majority of our history was lost, I hope that you’ll stick around to make some new history – you’ll find that with some of the newer changes that it’ll be well worth your time, are really useful, and will provide a much needed shot in the arm for IBN. So I am done feeling bad (mostly) I am ready to move on. Use this thread to vent, yell, scream, complain... get it all out whether it is at me or IBN's old web host.
Take your time, when you're done, I want to welcome you to Interbasket.net Version 3.0
Stuart
Interbasket was caught in a major server problem at my web host on April 21st. All my files were corrupted along with the backup files for the site. The good news is that I have all the information outside of the forum (profiles, Olympics, index etc) backed-up on my home personal computer, the bad news is that ALL FORUM threads, posts, images, and member profiles were corrupted and have been lost forever.
Needless to say, I was and am still pretty devastated. I was on a shared server with other websites and am certain that many of them are just as angry with our webhost as I am.
In the mid-afternoon on Saturday, I attempted to log into IBN to find that IBN's forum link wasn’t working. I thought to myself “Now, what?!” as I have been less-than-pleased with my web host the last 10-12 months.
I then attempted IBN’s homepage and found that a general “No page is configured at this address” page… which set off a lot of alarms for me. Normally, I would find out the entire site was down because of bandwidth issues or a billing discrepancy, but to see an actual webpage parked where my homepage was normally sitting signified that this wasn't an ordinary problem – either my webhost hadn’t had the chance to restore the backups or there were no backups to restore.
I confirmed a day later that the latter was true. I spent the entire day trying to contact many members of the forum and trying to get them to spread the word. All the while, I was caught in-between anger and sadness trying to get ahold of anyone that I could yell at. Those threads and posts and member profiles were part of IBN history. To me, it was like losing precious photo albums in a house fire. It wasn’t so much the threads, so much as chronicling our history.
I knew I had no control over it and yelling at them wouldn't do any good (though I really really wanted to), so I started planning out what I needed to do to get the site back up and keep it consistently live.
I began to look at this as a new start. I’ve wanted to change web hosts for some time now, but was afraid to. Ironically, I was worried that in the transition from affordablehost.com to a more reputable one would cause IBN to lose/corrupt information.
The irony of this situation is not lost on me.
However, with this recent happening, I am happy to move on from affordablehost.com, it started as a small local company where one could contact Tina, the woman who started the site whenever there was a problem and she would take care of it (I had her cell phone number!).
Then in late 2005, affordablehost was bought out by a large Canadian web host and from there, my problems began – my site was brought down because they thought I hadn’t paid (I had in fact prepaid for two years), they brought down two of my other sites without contacting me, they had a couple minor outages, and now this, all in about 6-7 months.
So I’ve frantically moved on to a more reputable host and I am pretty excited about it because they offer so much more for about the same pricing. This unfortunate event also gave us the chance to upgrade the forum, it’s much more powerful and is a newer version of what we were running on the old forum.
I want to preserve as much as we can control, so any ideas would be greatly appreciated. One thing I can control is changing the time in which you registered, so re-register with IBN 3.0 and contact me if you remember when you first registered on IBN 1.0. (If you look at my profile I was able to change my registration to August 27th, 2003 when IBN first went live)
So if you are interested, PM Matt or I with your old username (if different), when you registered on the old forum and one of us will change it over the next few weeeks.
I will be spending the next few weeks trying to get this new product off the ground and even though the majority of our history was lost, I hope that you’ll stick around to make some new history – you’ll find that with some of the newer changes that it’ll be well worth your time, are really useful, and will provide a much needed shot in the arm for IBN. So I am done feeling bad (mostly) I am ready to move on. Use this thread to vent, yell, scream, complain... get it all out whether it is at me or IBN's old web host.
Take your time, when you're done, I want to welcome you to Interbasket.net Version 3.0
Stuart
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