Here we go again.... Welcome to Popular Airsoft (Again)! It's been more than a week since the site went down due to some snafu that happened to our site, which we can now tell that the problem was not really the way we run our website, or how we maintain our own dedicated server. It was a problem that our hosting provider had brought upon themselves, and affected our service which should not have happened in the first place. This caused us a lot of inconvenience to our schedules and to our valuable readers.

Our server went down around 20:00 GMT last 7 October 2007. We were never informed why our server went down, and we weren't able to access our server since it was quarantined. We fired a flurry of emails and made calls to our hosting provider why our server was offline. Their support team informed us that there's a security breach to our server but they never got to inform us on time and why it happened, they just took the server offline, leaving us with no access to it, and we were not able to make our regular backups.

We pleaded to the provider to put the server back online for us to do our backup.  The provider put the server back online at 0300 GMT the next day (9 october 2007), and gave us 5 hours to download it. We got the notice at 0800 GMT (since we were asleep at 3 in the morning), but by then the site was already offline to make our own backups.

We requested for an incident report on what really happened to our server. They got back to us with a report about a server that we do not use, detailing the problem. That got us perplexed, why give us a report on a server that we don't use? If the problem is that server, then why put our server offline?

We sent a strongly-worded email to our provider regarding the incident on why we were given a report on a server we do not use. Their technical lead then sent us an email informing us that there was nothing wrong with our server, apologised for the confusion, and will put back the server online. But damage has been done, and we have decided to transfer to a new hosting provider which assures us of a more managed service in terms of security and backup.

It took us a while to get this site back up and running, and ensuring that everything is up and running again. We have to make sure that we get all the files from the previous hosting, and move all of these to the new one. There are some strict security policies in place, so we have to depend on the new provider's staff to install everything for us, which we didn't mind if this gets us peace of mind.

Well, that's water under the bridge now. What we are more concerned now is how to improve our service to the airsoft community. We got at least 10 days of break, allowing us to join in some skirmishes, wherever our contributors are located.

So here we are now, back in service, and waiting for all those stories and news you have for us.

Welcome to Popular Airsoft (again)!!! :)

Oh by the way, as of this writing, we just clicked the button cancelling the dedicated server account we have at the previous provider.