Over the last few days our website went down, as well as the StateDefenseForce.com Online Store. We’d like to explain the cause of the website going offline, as well as solutions we developed to avoid such disruption in the future.
Last week we utilized our funding, provided by our incredible Patreon Supporters, to increase the responsiveness of the website by upgrading to a new hosting package with our hosting provider, Host Gator. This new & upgraded plan was to provide for faster access to our site and better security. Our intent was to shorten the load times it took for our content to show up on your laptop, desktop or mobile device. We also wanted to increase the security of the website to avoid any disruptions from that avenue.
Unfortunately the Host Gator engineer that was responsible for that upgrade processed it very poorly. They activated certain domain functions we did not authorize to be turned on. In turn the website ran into catastrophic failures. We spent dozens of hours working to undo the action but were unsuccessful. A bug produced by this activation forbade us to return the website to working order.
We anticipated such situations might occur so we invested in a website backup service. This service was responsible for doing a daily backup of the website. When this error occurred we reached out to them but unfortunately the backup they provided of the website was corrupted and of no use to us.
After dozens of hours, last night we decided to switch to a new host provider, one that is a bit more expensive but has excellent customer service scores and has much faster website loading speeds. They were able to piece together the remnants of our broken databases from Host Gator and get the website online on their servers. We then spent the rest of the morning manually adding the content that was lost.
Going forward we intend to ensure such occurrences do not happen again in the future. We are planning on investing in multiple backup solutions. We plan on doing manual backups as well as employing another, more reliable, service for cloud backups. We also trust in our current provider as they have the best customer service scores in the industry.
We plan to provide you the best State Defense Force news & informational website experience from this time forward. We apologize for this disruption.
– StateDefenseForce.com Staff
