Westhost outage and data loss

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Westhost outage and data loss

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Hi all,

We're sorry to inform you that a major outage at Westhost's data center, a subsequent server crash and failure on Westhost's part to backup its data (in violation of its Service Level Agreement), has caused a small number of posts that have made since the 10th of February to disappear. :evil:
It was only because we backed up ourselves to our local machine that we were able to recover the forum's content at all at this stage.

We'll be working of the next several days to get everything back into its original state and, form there on, will move to a more reliable Amazon EC2 instance as soon as possible. We are currently waiting for Westhost to restore FTP access in order to be able to resume further recovery activities.

As far as we can retrace, we've lost 3 users registrations (cystokid, guyroch and Gedan) and we'll do our best to identify them and invite them to re-register.

We would like to express our severe frustration with Westhost and their highly unprofessional and, frankly, unforgivable practices. Outages can happen (and they have had more than their fair share the last couple of years), but data corruption and subsequent failure to produce backups is unforgivable.

We'll keep you updated.
Ivo Jager
StarTools creator and astronomy enthusiast
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