Just a quick post to explain what the recent downtime was all about,
About 4 months ago, we changed hosts for the site because it grew so fast and the hosts at the time couldn't handle us, I take full responsibility for the hosts that we chose, it was a company called Mochahost who are based in California US, they fed me some real good sales talk about how good there service is and how quick they respond to trouble tickets etc, I personally fell for this hook line and sinker and so opened a hosting account with them to host our busy site,
Not long into this we had some issues with sending emails and Mochahosts then informed us that they had disabled email sending because we were sending too many emails out, when I asked what they class as too many, they told me "Oh around 100 per hour is too many" now when you consider that we have close to 1000 members here and an average of 20-30 users online at any given time, the chances that we send more than 100 emails per hour are VERY good,
When I explained this to Mochahosts they said "Oh well we can't increase the limit, you'll have to order a VPS (Virtual Private Server) if you want to send more than 100 per hour" which kind of suprised me, the package we ordered was supposed to be a Reseller account, with the capability of hosting up to 50 domains so you would thing that 50 domains would send out more than 100 emails per hour ?
Anyway, I stupidly fell for there bullshit and went ahead and ordered a VPS from them, the package was supposed to include free migration for our account so that there would be no downtime whatsoever, 4 days after i placed the order I had to submit a ticket because they still hadn't set up the VPS, they eventually set it up and sent me the login details to access it, I started to set up the site and found that we couldnt add databases, so I submitted a ticket, 2 days later, the ticket got answered, and the problem was fixed, when I then asked them for nameservers for the VPS they told me "Oh we don't supply them, you have to register nameservers for the VPS yourself" which again suprised me, at this time I had an extensive chat with Rockape (because were in a different time zone than Rugger) about the best way forward, and we agreed that it would be in the best interest of the clan to get away from Mochahost as soon as possible and start with a GOOD and RELIABLE host,
When Mochahost found this out they simply disabled our account, regardless of the fact that we already paid, so I logged into the FTP to download the site files as quick as I could but half way through the transfer, Mochahosts blocked access to the FTP, So we ended up with half the site files and no database, amazing that they take 3-4 days to answer support tickets but can block access to FTP within minutes,
3 days later and a lot of support tickets, we have finally recieved the site files and database so we are now running on a VPS provided by a first class hosting company based in the UK, we should be at the same stage we were before Mochahosts screwed us over and server performance should be blisteringly quick no matter where you are in the world,
In short i guess I'm trying to say that I will take responsibility for the shit that happened over the last few months, I'd like to think that this is now sorted out so that we can continue to develop this site and make it THE BEST gaming clan site out there,
And to finnish i'd like to say this,
FUCK YOU MOCHAHOSTS, YOUR SERVERS ARE SHIT, YOUR CUSTOMER SERVICE IS SHIT, THANK GOD WE ARE FINALLY AWAY FROM THAT PATHETIC EXCUSE YOU CALL A BUSINESS !!!!!!
Thanks for reading