Jaia Interactive

Yep, we're back! For those of you who've just now come out from under that rock you've been living under for the past week, you may notice that all the topics, posts and members have just vanished! This announcement is meant to bring you all up to speed on what happened.

Early last week I attempted to access the boards and noticed that my requests kept on timing out. I tried accessing our site via the domain as well as it's IP address, but got nothing. I looked up our DNS servers and attempted to ping them as well, but got the same result. Anyone who knows basic computing could tell that something just wasn't right.

Well, I contacted Gene and he took a look as well just to confirm that it wasn't a routing issue on my part and, sure enough, we found that it wasn't. It turns out our VPS ( virtual private server ) got totally creamed and was inaccessible to the web. Gene managed to create an SSH session to see what was the matter, but he kept on getting booted off the server about every three minutes.

This meant that we had access to our files, but not enough time to transfer all the data to a temporary storage area. Gene then called our host at the time, Midphase, and asked for some assistance in getting the box up and running. Apparently, and I hope I got this right, they refused to help and instructed Gene to reformat everything and start over. Gene told them that this was not satisfactory and asked for them to, at least, give him access to the files we needed. They did not give him assistance in this either.

Did we have backups? Well, yeah, but the last one I managed to get was a few months old. To make things even better I simply could not unpack the archive without it corrupting random files. This normally wouldn't be a problem, but there have been so many 'special' database and module changes to the support build of MyTopix it would've just been incompatible.

I mentioned this and TFI and someone kindly informed me that a lot of hosts state in their TOS that they are not responsible for backing up data on your personal account. Well, be that as it may, it IS our data and not only do they not have a right to keep our property from us, but you'd think that they give at least a little bit of latitude when it comes to a customer who has been paying for their services for well over a year. I suppose they've never heard of going the extra mile for their faithful subscribers.

Because of this, they lost us as a customer. We have since moved to Site5 and are using them as our hosting provider until we grow large enough to need another dedicated solution.

So, here we are, starting fresh and feeling like crap because of what's happened. We are happy, however, to have such a loyal, understanding and, most of all, patient fanbase. We thank you for your support!

One final thing to note before I finish off here, if you're a staff member and want your access rights returned to you, please register if you haven't already and send me or Gene a note stating so. We'll get to you as soon as possible. Also, there may be a few areas on the board that haven't been perfected ( configuration-wise ). If you spot something out of the ordinary or inconsistent with the old site, please mention them in this announcement's corresponding discussion topic.

Thanks!