Well, that was fun.

My apologies for anyone who has tried to access RPLS Today on Thursday night, Friday night, all day Saturday, and Sunday morning. We've experienced a LOT of downtime the last few days due to a major server issue.

On Thursday, the server totally crashed. The host, who promises redundancy, was fit to be tied and I was pissed that their redundancy claims went straight out the window at that time. At first, they suspected it was a hard drive failure -- but if that's the case, then the ghosted secondary drive(s) would kick in, providing continuance of the website with little or no downtime. Anyway, the problem was fixed in the wee hours of Thursday night / Friday morning.

Then Friday night, the server crashed again. Same problem, supposedly, except that it's not just the one hard drive this time. Still, did we not learn our lesson the first time around? Apparently not. But this time, it was down for much longer.

Several months ago, when I was shopping around for a hosting company with great user reviews, strong uptime statistics, and other qualities that generally make a good hosting company, I chose these guys. At some point, you have to put a lot of faith into someone and hope that they make good on their promises. They have not and did not.

On Saturday mid-day, I'd had enough with their promises and total failure to make good on their guarantees, plus RPLS Today was still down! I understand, stuff happens. But the way they were floundering led me to believe that they didn't have much in the way of "Plan B" preparations, despite their claims. So... I looked among the runners-up I had on my list from before, performed some follow-up research to solidify them as much as possible, then chose one. So far, so good, and they helped a LOT with the migration. I've worked with a lot of hosting companies over the years and I've never experienced such excellent customer support -- but I am still skeptical due to past experiences.

Once the website was moved, we started testing and were having trouble getting forums and specific posts to show up at all. We discovered that the previous hosting company had their teeth sunk into us so deep, that we had to clean up their mess in the website's code. Ridiculous. Totally ridiculous.

So while this has been a painful experience, overall I'm glad that I found out their true colors only a few months after the big move.

I'm so glad we are back. I know you all have endured a lot of changes, and this only adds to the frustration. The only real consolation I can offer is that these latest issues occurred during our less busy times.