As you all know, we’ve had some troubles with our previous host (SurfHosting). We ended up giving them another try since they gave us a good deal; however, since then, they merged with another company who does not want to uphold that deal.
We’ve swapped to a European host (Hetzner). For some reason, the pricing in the EU is much better for these servers. We got roughly the same deal as we would have gotten with SurfHosting, but with a company that has existed since before 2000, and has a good reputation.
WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR SERVER AT SURFHOSTING
Recently, I was able to regain some access to the server there. On gaining access, I saw all files on one of the two drives were encrypted through ransomware. Luckily, almost everything was backed up properly. However, we did lose the CMI database (which was accidentally missed) and events, which wasn’t backed up at all. We had a version of events saved from a few months ago though, so that’s what we’re using now. Obviously, after discovering this, I wasn’t too keen to keep going with SurfHosting, but by this time the merger was already announced, so I did talk to the new company. In the end, I decided to leave to a more trusted provider.
HOW WE WILL AVOID THIS FROM HAPPENING AGAIN
We have no commitments to the host we’re with now, so switching would be easy. I’ve fixed the issues with the database backups; it now simply makes backups of all the databases instead of just the ones I specify. This wasn’t an option previously due to CoreProtect databases taking up a lot of space but not holding data we really care to back up. To solve this, CoreProtect is separate from the other databases now.
Events, and everything else that wasn’t backed up previously (like my personal projects) will now be backed up at least daily. This way, we have a significantly lower risk of losing data again in the future. Additionally, I will be saving copies of the setups for the Minecraft servers so it will be easier to reinstall on a new server should that ever be needed in the future.
WHEN WILL EVERYTHING BE BACK
I’ll be fixing the remaining issues over the coming week. I’ll only have time in the evenings, so I don’t have an ETA for each part that still requires fixing.
WHAT ABOUT VOTE KEYS?
Once voting is fixed we’ll calculate how many votes were missed (it’s going to be a lot) and give them to everyone!
