A Note About Downtime and Data Loss

If you haven’t noticed, we’re missing some posts and the site has been dealing with some serious issues the past week. Here’s a brief explanation:

Last Wednesday, both the site and forums went down for about 24 hours. Our host informed me that this was a server-wide outage caused by corrupt databases, and an earlier backup had to be restored.

Two days later, the site was generating database errors again and was down for nearly another full day. This time, however, the forums were restored to an even earlier backup.

When I asked our host for a newer backup to be restored, they instead restored our entire hosting account to a backup from earlier in January, which caused us to lose all of our recent posts including our Game of the Year content.

Despite clearly stating several times I needed a backup restored from after January 31 so that we could at least salvage our Game of the Year content, they continually (and fruitlessly) restored backups from January 26 and earlier dates. Finally, on Tuesday, after I pushed them harder, they restored a fairly recent database. While we’ve lost a few news posts and forum posts from the past week or so, they shouldn’t be too hard to make up. 

While this was going on, I was researching new hosts, and I contacted BigScoots due to their reputation in web hosting circles. I was thoroughly impressed with the service and help I received even before I was a customer, so as soon as the site was restored I immediately began the process of migrating 4P to BigScoots. I’m happy to announce that we’re now hosted on a purely SSD-powered server, and the site is snappier than it ever has been.

So I’d like to personally apologize for the downtime, and for any posts you may have lost in all this mess. Now that this week-long fiasco has come to an end, we can put this chapter of 4P behind us.

So here’s to a great future! We have a lot of great content planned in the coming weeks, so be sure to check back!