Hi hecko this sure has been a couple weeks so here's the breakdown of what happened. Since the host ended up not being a huge fricking gyp I will not be pillorying them as we intended to in the beginning and all the clever turns of phrase seething at them that I had been mentally drafting are no longer able to be deployed. But a rundown of the Temporal Crisis follows:

On 4? February at around 20:00 MST (Marsey Standard Time), rDrama.net went offline. This is usually no big deal; the server is restarting, Aevann merged something while half-asleep and then immediately went to bed, I decided to change the behavior of a jannie-only field and the site is down for 6 hours. You know the drill by now, it's standard fare and honestly not terribly common, but it does happen. This was a host error though, which is a rarity. So we waited a bit. Nothing happened. We checked our host's status page, all systems operational. We emailed our host. They apologized and said there's a technical snafu that should be resolved within the hour.

An hour passed. Then 3 hours passed. Nothing was back online and the status page was still showing all normal. We emailed the host again and at that point, they said there was some big issue now but it would be resolved "within 24 hours". Obviously this was completely unacceptable, but nothing we can do.

24 hours pass.

We email again, furious. ALL CAPS and lots of !!!!!!!!!!!!!s were used. Then they finally mansplained that a manager at the datacenter had gone rogue and unilaterally terminated their agreement with them, basically flipping a switch and shutting down all the shit for their clients. Quote:

We would like to inform you of a temporary infrastructure situation that may temporarily affect services hosted in the United States.

On February 4th, our U.S.-based data center unilaterally terminated the master service agreement with immediate effect, without prior notice. This action was taken by the data center operator and was not caused by any breach on our part. Our U.S. attorneys are actively handling this matter.

There's more of course, and we were kinda dumbstruck by how surreal this was. Went back and forth with them a bit and clarified that they were indeed saying that a datacenter individual with power decided to just axe them. Crazy stuff, but what can you do? So we tried to bully Google into unbanning our banned backup, also without success. So we figured we'd keep pushing that and trying with the host, maybe they could give us the datacenter contact info and we could negotiate with them for our shit.

We had our lawyer write a threatening letter. The host was apologetic but insistent that there was quite literally nothing that they could do. Can't transfer us the data, can't give us an ETA, nothing. We offered to provide a Hold Harmless agreement in exchange for the drive containing our data, no luck. A few days later they emailed again and said like GOOD NEWS WE HAVE YOUR DRIVE IT IS IN A STORAGE UNIT FOR A FEW WEEKS UNTIL WE GET A NEW DATACENTER UP AND RUNNING.

Now, in the interim there we'd done some homework and found that our host appears to be in arrears something like $42,000,000 in litigation. So we assumed almost from the outset that their hardware had been seized to help pay off this debt, and we had zero expectation of ever actually seeing it again, and with how bizarre the story was so far we thought this was just more of the same nonsensical fiction they were feeding us to shut us up while they hurried up and got out of the country. We shot our shot though and as you likely know by now, one thing led to another and we kept calling their bluffs and eventually I offered to straight up fly out there and pick the SSD up myself. Since they'd just offered to ship it to us (it DEFINITELY wouldn't be tragically damaged in transit, you know?), that won't be a problem, will it?

And lo and behold, it somehow wasn't a problem. I flew to and from Seattle and got a rental car, all at no charge, picked up the SSD from a very nice Ukrainian(?) man in an antistatic bag in a container absolutely filled with bubble wrap without any issue at all. I bought the chinesium enclosure I was told to buy. Ten gorillion shell commands and God knows what sort of witchcraft @Arrrvann had to do to make this all work in the end later, here we are.

The site is back. Something really fricking weird is going on in a Seattle datacenter. This strange hosting company does not appear to have done anything wrong at all besides being a bit misleading in the beginning of this whole debacle and we have no animosity towards them at all.

We now have 4 daily backups and the integrity of these will be checked on a weekly basis.

This will never happen again but it all worked out in the end and we learned stuff and we have a new holiday.

I am NOT sorry for the downtime it was NOT our fault how about YOU send ME 20k coins and a badge.

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