Hello everybody,

I start by apologizing for the inconvenience of this extended downtime period.

A short summary of the events is that our server crashed and we could not reboot it from the hosting administration console. Our (now former) hosting company (http://alienlayer.com) did not respond to our support tickets or calls, and did not reboot the machine for 6 days. As this is obviously unpardonable we have since moved, and purchased a dedicated server at another company (http://hetzner.de).

A couple of years ago when we moved to alienlayer, they seemed to be a small /cheap but up and coming company offering services across the board (shared hosting, VPS, dedicated), with decent reviews by users. Something must have happened in the mean time, because now there's dismal reviews and disgruntled users all over the place.

We've restored the data, everything should be the same as it was the second the server crashed. If you notice anything not working, please let us know, we'll try to iron out the remaining issues today and tomorrow.

Thank you for your support these last days, and your understanding.

This will not happen again in the future.

Just an FYI, when I log in I'm getting an error:

ssl_error_rx_record_too_long

Welcome back, Deckbox!

Thanks for the info. You guys rule!!

Glad to have you back. You guys ROCK!

It's great to have deckbox back, thanks for all the updates. Keep up the great work!

Hooray!

Good news is, while deckbox was offline, everyone still kindly sent their cards. :)

Thank you so much for letting us know! You guys rock!

Awesome. Was really sad that deckbox went down, but really glad to have it back.

Good to have you back.

Hetzner works well. I've used them for a site for around 3-4 years and no complaints.

Glad were back up and running.... you guys made the right decision

Great to see things up and running again! Thanks for all the work you guys do!

Welcome back. The only thing I noticed that didn't seem to be working properly was the auto-sizing of the user profile avatar pic. Instead of resizing to specified dimensions, the actual size of the image is displayed (which messes up the profile header formatting).

Thanks!

Welcome back! This is by far my favorite deck building site.

Honestly, I'd been considering abandoning you guys as, well, I could only write down so many new cards. The kind of dedication, honesty, and candour shown by this post to your community is, however, something surprisingly rare on the internet, and so I will keep supporting you guys :D. Thanks for having us in the loop...

THanks for letting us know, hope the new host works out for you. :)

Glad to see you guys back.

Sad to hear your problems. I've had to deal with bad hosts in the past like this. It's always SUPER frustrating.

Glad to see you guys are back. Now I know first hand how hard it is to construct decks without deckbox (struggling to remember how we used to do it in the days before deckbox - scary!) - here is hoping that I never have to again!

Good to have you back!
Our whole comunity was dead in the water without deckbox :)

We missed you! :D Really, I check deckbox every day. It was weird to skip it in my morning Internet routine :)

My husband and I are so glad you guys are back up and running. Deckbox is BY FAR the BEST deck building site we've found. Now, to input this big stack of Magic cards that's been sitting on my desk the past couple of days.... :D

Welcome back Deckbox! You were sorely missed.

Look I'll be honest with you. I don't mind that it happened. We all know hosting issues/server issues happen. What I don't like is the fact that you didn't have a way to get a hold of people or a secondary place where you gave people an explanation as to what was going on. I just looked on the front page and I don't see a Facebook, twitter, YouTube, or whatever have you FREE service where people can go to check. I happened to search Facebook and found a place that looked right, posted a question and got a response but these things should be already in place. As soon as you knew what was going on there should have been a Facebook post, twitter post and whatever post about it. Hell I thought WotC may have strong armed the site down. I've been a part of sites that have disappeared with no warning and I'm glad that's not what happened here.

First of all, I would like to thank everybody for their support and kind words over the past period, it's been really nice to see so many people appreciate our work and are using this website. This has given us one more incentive to get off our asses and finally deliver some of the stuff we've been promising :D!

As for the means for announcing our users about downtimes, features, announcements and so on, we have a facebook page, as well as a twitter page, and I have to say they are not new. Even though we are not as active as we'd like on these social websites, they have been in place almost since the beginning of Deckbox. Here they are:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Deckbox/141206785897194
Twitter: http://twitter.com/#!/deckbox_org

I know they are not very easy to find on our main pages, but I assure you we've made them much more visible in the new interface to come ( stay tuned ;) ). Sebi has been posting updates about the downtime and the progress of getting Deckbox back up on Facebook, I am really sorry you missed them. We apologize once again for this extended downtime and we took all the measures of ensuring that we keep the risk of this happening again to a minimum.

noviceuser wrote:Look I'll be honest with you. I don't mind that it happened. We all know hosting issues/server issues happen. What I don't like is the fact that you didn't have a way to get a hold of people or a secondary place where you gave people an explanation as to what was going on. I just looked on the front page and I don't see a Facebook, twitter, YouTube, or whatever have you FREE service where people can go to check. I happened to search Facebook and found a place that looked right, posted a question and got a response but these things should be already in place. As soon as you knew what was going on there should have been a Facebook post, twitter post and whatever post about it. Hell I thought WotC may have strong armed the site down. I've been a part of sites that have disappeared with no warning and I'm glad that's not what happened here.

https://twitter.com/#!/deckbox_org
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Deckbox/141206785897194

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Excellent name, avatar, and response.