Server Failure - Board Downtime

[jimnyc]

Copy of newsletter I just emailed out to the board:

Debate Policy went offline at approximately 7:30pm EST this past Friday evening. The server in which the site is hosted on suffered a severe hardware failure, specifically, the drive array crashed. The server needed to be replaced, a new array put in place, and then the server completely restored. This resulted in the forums being down for more than the past 36 hours. My hosting provider has worked hard during this outage to bring the service back to nominal performance and assures me the site is now on a new server and is being monitored for performance, and hopefully will be better than before the outage. As a precaution, I am having backups performed 2x daily now and am doing a little shopping around in case there is a need for change in the near future. Please accept my sincerest apologies for this lengthy downtime. I would have loved to have emailed the entire community with an update, but unfortunately this required access to the server in order to do so. I am thinking of utilizing a seperate service for user mailings in such cases to keep the community aware when there are issues in reaching the site.

We are back online now and fully functional. We are hoping everyone will return and get us going once again and get the heated debates re-opened. I missed all the namecalling and hating of one another for a few days! :-)

Due to the amount of downtime and entrants unable to get their picks in, picks for this week are being suspended and we will continue next week where we left off.

Come check out the forums, give your thoughts about the upcoming elections, and talk with some old friends!

http://www.debatepolicy.com

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[jimnyc]

Since this is a forum, the data both for HTML and the SQL database are constantly being updated. The server array died at approximately 7:30pm EST on Friday, and it appears the last post on the board when it came back up today was at 3:56pm EST on Friday. Just an Fyi if you notice a few hours worth of posts missing.

[-Cp]

And to think you're paying good money for such a crappy host....:/

[Pale Rider]

And to think you're paying good money for such a crappy host....:/

No kidding. So I hope they're going to pro-rate your bill Jimmy, for the 36 hours of which you had no server.

P.S. The board did open really quick just now. Better than usual.

[diuretic]

Well, I'm relieved - I thought it was something I said