I would like to thank everyone for supporting us during our recent downtime. Unfortunately, it was inevitable. On Saturday morning, at 9:30 a.m., I tried accessing the site only to find it was down. I called my host immediately and they were not only unaware of the problem, but they didn't know how to fix it. After a few hours on the phone with technical support, I was able to conclude that the machine had actually lost its network connection entirely. It could not even see other machines in the same datacenter. Unfortunately, my host didn't agree with me, insisting that the sluggishness of the machine was due to me running too many concurrent MySQL connections, despite a CPU load of 0.01. Therefore, they refused to do anything about it. Meanwhile the site was mostly down and there were fewer than 30 people logged into the forums. It took until 6 p.m. for me to finally convince them that it was a network issue. It turns out that the previous night, my host mistakingly assigned another machine my block of IP addresses. It actually took them 10 hours to figure this out, despite seeing that everytime they SSH'ed into the daniweb server they were taken to an entirely different server.

Frustrated, I signed up with a different host, which was set up late Saturday night. (I would like to graciously thank them for putting me ahead of the queue of new servers to be set up.) However, I had to wait another day for the DNS to propagate. In addition, I had to wait for my old host to get their act together, and figure out some way for me to get a recent backup of the database off of a machine with no functioning network. (Yes, after two days, they still couldn't figure it out.)

Needless to say, we are now on a new, stable network, which a much nicer server. Thank you for your patience and continued support.

Unfortunately, the latest backup I have was from Saturday at noon. However, because very few people were able to connect to the site at all, we only lost about 15 posts.

I also apologize to those people who registered over the weekend. Unfortunately, due to no network connection on the server, the activation email was unable to be sent out to anyone. I have therefore manually activated all new members who registered this weekend.

In addition, I am giving all current advertisers 10% extra banner impressions of however amount they ordered.