Some of you may be wondering about what happened to these forums and why they were down for such a long time? Well, I decided to share all the details, as much as I can remember. It is a fascinating timeline so I hope you read the whole thing.
-In Aug 2017, GoDaddy (our hosting company) announces major changes affecting large forums, giving admins couple of months to fix things. Unfortunately, while they gave us time to fix things, nothing seemed to work, including attempts to reduce the size of the DB to their new acceptable max
-By Feb 2018, site is mostly down and attempts to fix it are only temporary
-Last posts on the forum are posted by mid April 2018 and after that the forum become completely inaccessible
-next few months included multiple phone calls to Godaddy and many sleepless nights trying to fix things to no avail.
-by mid 2018 and through early 2019, I enlisted the help of others online to try and help me fix things and still no luck , despite their serious efforts, as most backup files I had were now corrupt and further attempt to fix things actually make it worse.
-by summer 2019, I decided to explore another hosting company in hopes of having a better luck with this (CrocWeb)
-by late 2019, I became too busy with things and put these plans on hold.
-by early 2020, I restart my effort again but in a limited capacity
-one day in Feb 2020, I was at my brother's home trying to fix his laptop. This is a laptop he had used at his old restaurant business (and which I had used too) and as I was cleaning some folders and large files, something caught my attention: there was a backup I had made of my forum back in early 2018!!! What a pleasant shock! Right away I saved it to a USB drive and took it home. You see, while I would make regular backups (and I thought GoDaddy was too), I also had a habit of making these random backups on other computers should the impossible happens and I need a backup of a backup of a backup .
-but due to the Corona virus and having to work from home , I didn't do anything with this newly found backup file. I was simply too busy and despite working from home, ironically I had less time to work on my forum.
-one day in mid April , I was jogging with my wife when I received a call from my brother telling me that someone on Facebook is asking about my website and what had happened to it. Somehow this call got to me (fired me up and motivated me) and I realized that I should restart my efforts to try and fix this forum
-that same night I started working on the laptop around 11 PM and by 2 AM , the miracle had finally happened: the forum had been fixed and was back online. Literally resurrected from the dead!!!!!!
-By late May, I decided to migrate the forum to a new platform, making it so much easier to view and post from mobile phones.
ASHOOR
-In Aug 2017, GoDaddy (our hosting company) announces major changes affecting large forums, giving admins couple of months to fix things. Unfortunately, while they gave us time to fix things, nothing seemed to work, including attempts to reduce the size of the DB to their new acceptable max
-By Feb 2018, site is mostly down and attempts to fix it are only temporary
-Last posts on the forum are posted by mid April 2018 and after that the forum become completely inaccessible
-next few months included multiple phone calls to Godaddy and many sleepless nights trying to fix things to no avail.
-by mid 2018 and through early 2019, I enlisted the help of others online to try and help me fix things and still no luck , despite their serious efforts, as most backup files I had were now corrupt and further attempt to fix things actually make it worse.
-by summer 2019, I decided to explore another hosting company in hopes of having a better luck with this (CrocWeb)
-by late 2019, I became too busy with things and put these plans on hold.
-by early 2020, I restart my effort again but in a limited capacity
-one day in Feb 2020, I was at my brother's home trying to fix his laptop. This is a laptop he had used at his old restaurant business (and which I had used too) and as I was cleaning some folders and large files, something caught my attention: there was a backup I had made of my forum back in early 2018!!! What a pleasant shock! Right away I saved it to a USB drive and took it home. You see, while I would make regular backups (and I thought GoDaddy was too), I also had a habit of making these random backups on other computers should the impossible happens and I need a backup of a backup of a backup .
-but due to the Corona virus and having to work from home , I didn't do anything with this newly found backup file. I was simply too busy and despite working from home, ironically I had less time to work on my forum.
-one day in mid April , I was jogging with my wife when I received a call from my brother telling me that someone on Facebook is asking about my website and what had happened to it. Somehow this call got to me (fired me up and motivated me) and I realized that I should restart my efforts to try and fix this forum
-that same night I started working on the laptop around 11 PM and by 2 AM , the miracle had finally happened: the forum had been fixed and was back online. Literally resurrected from the dead!!!!!!
-By late May, I decided to migrate the forum to a new platform, making it so much easier to view and post from mobile phones.
ASHOOR
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, shh don’t let Atourina hear us!!!