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Link Site problems / 2005-07-29 10:13

Good morning everyone,

I'm sure you all realized the site has been very, very screwy lately. I'll try to explain what happened to the best of my knowledge (explanations from my host were limited despite my numerous inquiries).

After all the MAX_CONNECTIONS errors were getting out of hand, our host moved us to a new, more powerful server. In the process they managed to restore only an incomplete database, missing quite a few tables (including the User accounts and Reviews). The board was unaffected, since all the tables for it were fine.

So after I yelled at them about this, they restored it back fully - but instead of restoring the missing tables only they loaded EVERYTHING, including the forums, thus overwriting everything that had been posted on the board in the meantime.

But the host decided to limit our bandwidth "for testing", and they would "remove it shortly", causing us 24+ hours (hah, shortly) of excessive slowness. I inquired (at least three times) how long this would last and received no reply.

Then, the next thing I know yesterday evening, they overwrote the database content AGAIN, using the INCOMPLETE ONE. Why they did this is beyond me, I have not received any decent explanation about it. So not only were all the posts made in between both database copies gone, but the reviews and such were still not back up, causing a lot of errors. I preferred to shut down the site with the short message instead of having a messed up buggy one, I'm sure you understand why.

I have then sent a nasty message about this, demanding a refund, but so far, no official reply. I did, however, speak with the lead staff this morning on MSN about this. He restored the database again, and now it seems to run fine. Of course, once again the forum posts are overwritten, but there's nothing that can be done about that at this point, so you'll have to live with it.

I don't know for how long this site will be stable, but I was told they would monitor it carefully. Let's hope this is the last of our problems, at least for a while. *knocks on wood*

We're very sorry for all the problems and downtime. Unfortunately it was all beyond our control. We have received a lot of complaints by email, and we can't answer them all, so instead I posted this and I hope it clears up some confusion. Keep in mind that the traffic for Metal Archives is HUGE, and seemingly keeps on growing, which might account for those problems. If it was more affordable we'd look into going on a dedicated server, but our options are limited at this time.

Thanks for your comprehension, and enjoy the site once again - for now.