[Marshall Stanton]

As many of you on the forums are aware, we moved our entire website less than a year ago to dedicated hosting, to improve performance, speed and reliability of our services. Lately, we've had some issues of threads being lost on the forums, some intermittent down times that were inexplicable, but most recently, a 39 hour downtime that lasted from around midnight 21 July until sometime around 3pm PDT on the 22nd.

The company we were hosting this website through, on a dedicated server, is MCHost, and for no apparent reason, our entire website, our administrative control panel and our email servers were locked down, and our account suspended. Without notice, without justification, and the only message that anyone accessing the website would get, is an Over Bandwidth notice, and denial of access to the websites.

We had quite the running battle with MCHost for that 39 hour period.

Read the flap about this fiasco here:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showt...threadid=167255

That last thread was locked, because the owner of MCHost squalled about the adverse publicity. So, here's the rest of that squabble.

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=167571&highlight=MCHost

Still no valid reasons for why we were locked down, but rest assured, Alex is making tracks to get us off this server, and onto another, more stabil and reputable host than we're currently using. Kind of like a marriage, you don't really know the partner until you've lived with them a while. Same holds true with a webhosting company. We thought we had the perfect solution. Seems that is far from the case, but at least with the next move it will be relatively seamless according to Alex, as he's got a better system for moving the files, and setting up the domains so that most people won't even know that it's actually happened.

Thanks for the patience, and I'll keep you all abreast of latest developments! We have a policy here of openness and honesty, and thought you folks here on the forums should know and understand what's happening here.

God Bless, and thank you all.

Marshall

 

[Marshall Stanton]

A quick update. As you can see from attempting to access our archived Tech Notes, Tips, Open Sight, and other feature articles, the links are broken. That's through no fault of our own, but a glitch in the old host's now-changed system. That code for the archived articles has worked for three years without a glitch. When the outfit we're currently hosted with finally got us back online, those links didn't work anymore, and the problem is with the configuration of their Apache based server.

Alex, as I write this is in the process of moving us to a new host, one more stabil, MUCH faster, and above all, they are above board! You may or may not see any glitches or down time to the website, we simply don't know how smoothly the transition will take place until we're in the middle of the switch, but none-the-less, if there are any down times, it will be significantly less than any of the intermittent down times we have experienced as a direct result lately of our current host. Please be patient with us if there are snags in the system. If existant, they will be minimal.

Finally, once completed you fine folks will enjoy the quality service and reliability that this site demands.

Thanks again for your participation, making this the excellent resource and environment it has become, and we're doing everything we can to enhance your time spent here.

God Bless,

Marshall Stanton

 

[Marshall Stanton]

OK Folks,

We're in the process of changing over to a new server today (Tuesday 12 Aug), and you will see some abnormalities in perahps our home page, the various sections of the website intermittently will be down, but not for long, a matter of minutes in most cases.

Also, we'll be shutting down the forums for a period of about three hours in order to move the entire forum to the new server without losing any data. Also, you'll be getting a bonus, as we're updating the forum software, adding many new features giving you, the users more flexiblity, better search functions, more feature filled PM system, selectable display views and an overall upgraded and easier to use system. It will look and feel basically the same, but the advanced features all should appreciate. We will have perhaps the most advanced forum platform in the shooting industry at this time. Too, we'll not have the problems of lost threads.

Lastly, the server we're moving everything onto is BLAZINGLY FAST! It is actually faster than what Google uses! You'll see a marked improvement in load times for the entire website, and combining the new server speed, with the new forum software, these forums will be MUCH faster to browse.

Please bear with us today and tomorrow, the results will be worth any inconvenience you might experience.

Thanks again, and we'll look forward to seeing you all on the new system.

God Bless,

Marshall