We are back!

Where to start?

Well it’s been an interesting few weeks for the sites hosted on this server (Milanmania and Finalfootball) for sure. Firstly we were hacked about 2-3 weeks ago, we did some emergency band aid fixes to get the sites back up and running as soon as possible, that was always going to be the short term resolution to this issue. We were expecting to be able to plan some downtime and take the necessary actions to fix the hacked server.

Unfortunately (and fortunately – will explain as I go on) our hosts took action and turned our server off because of a violation of the Acceptable use policy. I called them and it seems the hackers were attempting a denial of service on their DNS servers. Obviously their priority was to their network and all of their clients rather than just ourselves and the other servers that were hacked (and by all accounts there were quite a few of them).

I managed to talk to one of their tech guys and he agreed to give me time to backup the data and send a short email to all of our users of the sites. The plan was then to go ahead and let them format the drive, reload it and we’d be up and running within 24 hours or so. However, they started to have some issues in getting the operating system and the management software installed on this server, so that 24 hours changed to about 3 days.

Saturday morning I called and spoke to the sales team explaining the issue and explaining that we need to be up as soon as possible. The upshot is that we have moved to a new server, this server has twice the available memory and its processor is over twice as fast. This should make the sites a little bit more responsive when posting and browsing the threads. The flipside to this is the site costs have increased and we may be looking for additional regular monthly contributors in the near future. This is purely voluntary and you’ll get a good sense of helping your favourite sites in return for your generosity. Anyone that is interested in helping out, please PM one of the Admins/Owners of the sites.

Also because we moved to a different server, the DNS propagation may take a while to replicate to your ISP, that is something that is beyond our control, but you can be sure the sites are back up and running and eagerly awaiting your return.

Sincerely,

Admin teams