As you may have noticed we've had some server issues and down time the past couple of weeks. These were caused by hardware malfunctions. To resolve these issues I have replaced pretty much our entire server and have started migrating to a new platform. It gets technical real quick, but in short it means our hosting will be simplified once everything is done.
Everything in this case actually means a ton of work. It's almost like starting all of our servers from scratch. And on top of that we have to debug a lot of scripts so they actually work on the new platform. For example: did you know that our forum software doesn't actually work on PHP 7? It was made for PHP 5 (which was released July 14th, 2004) and I had to rewrite quite a few functions to get the forum to work again. After that I was a guessing game trying to figure out which PHP and/or Apache functions weren't yet enabled. Fun times
For now the website and forum are back. Currently I'm uploading back-ups of our various game servers. This is done while the server's raid arrays are still being initialized which literally takes more than a day. Given the size of the back-ups, the server load and the time of day, it's going to be at least tomorrow (my time, CET) before we get game servers back up. When that is done I need to debug the scripts we use to start, monitor and automatically restart our servers. Then there are bound to be new issues we'll have to look at. So it's probably going to be a while longer before everything is back to normal again.
Anyway, sorry for the down time guys. I know a lot of you have vacation time right now and would like to play on our servers. We'll be back soon™
Also be sure to follow me on
Twitter. I don't make a lot of tweets. It's mainly used to let people know if there's a problem I can't otherwise communicate. For example when the servers are down
vBulletin Message