We’re Back!!!

Your eyes are not deceiving you. The post title is correct! We are back! One year later and just in time for the holidays. I am sure you will notice things are much different. We hope you enjoy the new site, allot of time and work has gone into getting the site up and running again. There are some minor changes that need to be made throughout the site, most everything is minor, so it can be changed as we go along.

I guess I should give everyone a rundown of what’s been going on and why it’s taken so long for the site to come back to life from it’s rough journey through cyber hell.

•1) Previous host screwed us over big time. We used to be hosted by VizaWeb. They are crooks and I do not want to plug their name, but I think you all should know about them and their crooked ways of doing business. Back in August / September of 07 we decided it was time to switch hosts because we had constant issues with VizaWeb. There were times where the servers would go offline multiple times per day without any notice or warning. Service was slow, they capped our bandwidth due to high traffic flow even though we were paying for a big pipeline. This caused the sites that we host to run extra slow. I cannot tell you how many e-mails I have received from loyal readers telling us when the server was down and how slow it was. The poor performance definitely had an impact on our readers.

VizaWeb downgraded our hosting package with no warning when they upgraded their service plans, they demoted us to a cheaper plan, but they still charged us the same price that we were paying for the higher package. After many e-mails back and forth, they finally acknowledged their “mistake” and lowered the price and put us back on the plan we were originally hosted under. VizaWeb also upgraded to PHP5 and newer versions of MYSQL with out warning. This broke allot of services that were written in PHP4. This upgrade knocked out the Image Host because it was written in PHP4, of course allot of the code had to be changed to reflect the changes to PHP. The upgrade messed up more stuff that eventually had to be re-written or changed.

VizaWeb would not answer support tickets. Trying to get a response from VizaWeb was like trying to tie a knot in a camels tail, it just isn’t going to happen. Even if the camel is dead, I think you’d have a hard time putting a knot in it’s tail, but I digress. After suffering with poor service for nearly 2 years, I decided it was time to break it off with VizaWeb. The very last payment was coming up at the end of the month. I contacted them to tell them I wouldn’t be renewing because I was going to cancel my account. They were nice enough to acknowledge this. They put a suspension on the hosting account because the bill wasn’t paid. I explained to them that I was canceling the account. I also explained to them that we needed to get our files and backups from them before the account was closed.

Did they listen? Heck no! VizaWeb canceled the account without verification or notification. Basically we were locked out of the account, I contacted them to get the files and backups, they didn’t listen, and they went ahead and deleted the account. I tried to contact them numerous times, they wouldn’t respond to my support tickets, phone calls, e-mails, nothing. I posted on their public forums only to have the threads deleted or locked. Basically that’s the gist of it. VizaWeb took the money and ran, sabotaged everything we had and then ignored us. The only local backups I had were from July, the recent ones were stored on the server. Stupid of me I know. I didn’t think they would do something like that to their loyal paying customers. We aren’t the only ones that this has happened to. Check out their support forums, it’s chock full of unhappy customers that they screwed over.

•2)After the VizaWeb fiasco it was time to look for a new host. I signed up with a great host this time around. We have been with Host Gator since September 2007. Everything is going great. I cannot say enough good things about them. Everything is perfect so far.

After gathering up what backups I had, it was time to start rebuilding the server and sites. I restored most of the databases that were backed up from the July 07 backup. We lost many posts and articles, image uploads from the image host, comments, statistics, files that were hosted on the server, etc. There was more stuff gone that I had expected. After getting things to a semi working state I decided it was time to do a whole new upgrade since we’d be starting nearly from scratch.

I ran into many MYSQL problems, WordPress issues, PHP errors, file permission issues, and other database problems, it was a disaster. I had to manually weed out the problems, this took a great deal of time. Since ghostshadow has been the only person working on all of this stuff, it’s been rough.

•3) After getting most of the problems worked out I decided that we needed a new forum to go with the new site. That took several months. We were all tired of Proboards. I took up the task to build a new forum and theme it. That took several months, after getting everything the way I thought it should be, it was time to try to port over the posts from Proboards. Proboards doesn’t give you any access to your files, posts, or database, they manage all of it. Luckily there is a good lad that wrote some python scripts that read the database and it pulls all of your posts from Proboards’ server. Take that!

I snatched all of the files from Proboards, so I ran the other python scripts and ran the tables into the new forums database, everything went smoothly. So all posts are now in the new forum. That was a big task, it took me a while to get the forums the way they are now. We purchased a new domain and configured everything for that as well.

•4) Now all of that stuff is taken care of. Jump to today, the new site is here! The forum is up, everything seems to be working good now. I wanted to do things the way I had visioned it from the get go a couple years ago. I wanted the site to be more dynamic than what it was. I want it to be more community driven and interactive. I want people to be able to participate in the articles and everything. I think it’ll be easier to do it now. The site is no longer revolving around Knox Ware and it’s projects, it’s now revolving around YOU, the reader.

We plan on covering everything we used to + much more. I hope you all enjoy it. I would encourage everyone to stop by the forum, we need to get some posting going on. I would also like to encourage you to give us suggestions on the site. I know everything isn’t perfect, some graphics need to be altered and changed, directories are still being figured out and worked on. I’m trying to organize everything so it’ll make sense, some things are scattered throughout the site. Just bear with it for a little bit, things are getting better.

Expect to see many new posts, we’re ready to start writing again. I am here to entertain you all, inform you and hopefully teach you something. I hope you stick around to see what we happens.

Much love and thanks go out to those that have stuck it out through the thick and thin.

-ghostshadow

HA!

Tags: Announcements, Site News, upates

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