Hi there again, I'd like to apologize to everyone for last night's downtime.. we had some serious hosting adventure.
There was a problem with my hosting's hard disk drive and yesterday afternoon they notified me that it started having issues,
so they emailed us to keep an offline backup of our sites. However I was away from the computer and didn't notice that. The
hard disk failed a couple of hours later and they got a recovering team on it. After a lot of hours thankfully they managed to
recover everything stored in the HDD so there was absolutely no information lost and now our forum is back up and running.
There's a good lesson to be learned here regarding all those sites that disappear due to hosting failure..
It is the owner's responsibility to keep frequent backups. I personally keep an offline backup of the whole forum once every
5 days (it notifies me if I haven't) so we'd only lose some of the latest discussions (that would be a pity too though..). But
not everything can be lost if we're careful enough.
Of course PTC sites need much more frequent backups than this. Even a day of lost info there can lead to a terrible mess.
It's true that sometimes technology fails, hosting fails, PayPal fails, everything fails but with good precaution we can avoid
big time losses. My best idea of backup-ing for an important site would be an automated system that keeps a backup of the
whole site both online and offline every hour or something. It's really worth it if we're serious about our site.
Well, good thing is that we are back online and alive.
So have a nice time discussing mates!
SolidSnake
PS. It's a good time now to take a full backup of the site's code and everything..