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Due to frustration with Dreamhost...and generally coming to hate Dreamhost I have ordered a year long plan with MonteCarloHosting.net

Bronze Plan
5,000 MB of Bandwidth
250 MB of disk space
Unlimited domains, e-mail resources and databases.
 $59.50 USD for 1 year.

So..why am I choosing to pay the same amount of money for LESS bandwidth and disk space?
Because MonteCarloHosting isn't a dirty shit company like Dreamhost.

Dreamhost stuck us on a server with THOUSANDS of other websites. We got crappy hardware too, as evidenced by problems. And once problems did happen...they couldn't help us!

MonteCarloHosting is a great company. Owned by one guy. He's highly rated. He doesn't pack his servers with thousands of customers. He buys his servers from great places. He used 3 different providers to give nearly 100% uptime.

That's why I am changing hosting companies.

In about a week my order will be processed. I'll transfer everything, set it all up and then we'll have some quick, quick downtime. I promise, quick! If any downtime.

The server unexpectedly went offline a couple of days ago.

Basically, the server hosting and serving all of our files for the site went down. All of my files were lost. They restored a 2 week old backup now. So all of the files being used to show this site are 2 week old.

Except for the database of posts and topics. That is right up to date. The database is on a different server which never went down.

So...for the next while if you spot any errors I will try to fix them.
Sooner or later the host is going to put 100% recent files on the server from right before the crash.

I would apologize for the downtime but it's not my fault :/

Babysitting Bugsy
Posted (October 28th, 2008 at 9:17 pm PST) by Jason C

It would appear that the server “bugsy” had a few issues that required the loving attention of a member of our admin team.  As it stands, the server is going thru a deep file system check that requires some close monitoring due to possible intervention.  Once it is done with that, everything should hopefully come back up and return to normal.  If that doesn’t happen, we’ll be sure to post an update here.

UPDATE: We have been working on Bugsy throughout the evening and we are at a point where we are working on repairing the disks.  If that does not work, we’ll restore from backups and then repair the disks.  Unfortunately, we have no ETA on this process, but we will update here as soon as we know more.

UPDATE 10/29 3:10p Pacific: Unfortunately we still do not have a solid ETA on a resolution for bugsy. We are however attacking the issue with both solutions listed above. We have a new bugsy up and we are copying data from our backups to this server. The new bugsy is the live server so you may notice that your files are missing. Do not fear, they are being copied from backups. We are also still trying to repair the disks on old bugsy. If that is successful then ...

Last night Red Milk Crate fell offline for 20 minutes or so. This was simply a problem requiring a server reboot. No worries. No changes happened with the forum during this downtime.

Tonight I expect another 15 minutes of downtime for some more fun stuff up at Dreamhost.

This better not become a habit for them...

I have now upgraded the forum to SMF 2.0Beta4

Summary of the events
-Upgraded the forum
-Reinstalled the Arcade - will be bring the arcade back online later. All scores/data lost.
-Reinstalled the Gallery, all data was preserved
-I need to wait for the Literature mod to be created for our version, data is planned to be kept
-Removed the Arcade/Lit buttons for the time being
-Some skin changes
-Referral mod is back online, all data was kept.

I'll give the full story so that everyone can understand what is going to happen.

SMF (Simple Machines Forums) is the software this forum is built off of. It's just like phpBB or any other forum software...except it's not. Other small differences but you get the idea.

At this time the developers over at SMF are slowly moving from version 1.1 to version 2.0
Right now the "stable" version is considered to be 1.1.x and 2.0.x is the "Upcoming Preview". Unfortunately the differences between 1.1.x and 2.0.x are fairly substantial.

What this means is that nearly everything custom coded for 1.1 needs to be recoded for 2.0 whenever I decide to upgrade.

So, instead of coding a whole load of stuff right now then having to recode a whole load of stuff later I am simply going to take the easy route out. I am going to upgrade to 2.0.x right now and do all of the work on 2.0 and then I don't have to recode everything later!
But, this means that I need to spend some time and recode everything I have done up until now. I have got the bulk of the work out of the way...but not all of it. And I can't finish the rest of it until I upgrade.

Here is what I plan to happen:
1) I take the forum offline
2) I upgrade the database to 2.0
3) I upload all of the recoded files
4) I bring the forum back online
5) I finish the rest of the coding

Expected Issues:
-Arcade is lost. I am going to ditch the shitty arcade we have now and move onto the new 2.0 arcade
-Gallery/Literature is lost. I'll look into being able to "upgrade" them and not losing everything..but the easy route out might just to be a fresh install.

I plan for it to take a fair while. Maybe an hour?

Anyways, it's not going to happen today anyways.
Probably this weekend.