Lost posts and possible funding solutions for Microlighters

[Morph]

Sorry guys,

EZhost don't seem to be able to help me on this one. The threads for the week 08July to 16July are gone, lost forever.

We can move this site back to a local site (Hetzner) which is more reliable but at the moment it is hosted free of charge off shore. If we move it local we are going to have to pay R6000 per year hosting fees. We cannot expect Demon to fund this out of his pocket as he has done in the past.

If anyone can come up with a creative way of funding this apart from advertising and popups then please post these ideas.

Me personally am quite happy to pay a few rand a month to keep this awesome site going and I would set up a stop order to pay the money into a Microlighters fund. The more people the better

10 people = R50 per month
100 people = R5 per month etc.

I have my own server and could host the site but I only have a 128K diginet line and this traffic would kill the link

What about a cost to the guys who are advertising their services, i.e. the training schools, manufacturers etc. 20 of them would fund the site easily at R300 per year. For the amount of business this site brings them it's a steal

[Tailspin]

I would setup a debit order aswell to make things more stable.

Maybe you should setup a poll and see what the "community" thinks Morph ??

[Tumbleweed]

I think a bit of everything.

R 500 p/a flying schools
R 600 p/a Destination fly-in Resorts ( Thats where the bucks are)
R 200. every succesfull plane sale
R 20.00 ever successfull smalls sale.
R 500p/a link to supplier's web page

The rest, show the details and we'll keep the kitty going.

JUST NO POP UP ADVERTISING

[RudiGreyling]

Hi Morph,

before we act we need to figure out what happened, to last weeks threads.
- Did someone by accident restore an old backup, finger trouble...
- Did we get hacked, by someone guessing the admin passwords and then playing with us.

The site worked perfectly, at a good price (FREE), until just now. May I suggest looking at who could have caused it and limiting the administrator users that could have done it. Then change all those passwords to something not easily guessable.

If it happens again, then we need to look for alternative hosting space that charges. This recent lost of posts is inconvenient, but it could have been much worse. Are we taking copies of the backups to somewhere else in case webhost burns down?

PS: I'm hosting with www.freepgs.com, they charge very little $3 for lifetime, but you get what you pay for, no backups and their datacenter burned down last year leaving me stranded for 6 weeks. Luckily I had a backup somewhere else, so I only lost most recent updates.

Just my 2c,
Regards
Rudi

[Morph]

I have managed to get hold of the chap at Ezhost and we have found a backup up to and including the 15th of July. That means we will loose posts for the 16th and 17th, but as we know weekends are not as buzy as weekdays. It's better than not having any of the posts.

Ezhost are going to have a look at the data to see if they can do a partial restore of the posts from the 9th to the 15th. If this is possible we will take the forum down tommorow morning, run a full backup, restore the lost posts and test. If all is ok then cool, else we will return to the full backup and not have any of the posts.

WRT how this happened, Ezhost will look into it and come back to us.

Once again we apologise, and let's see what can be done

[ezhost]

Hi Guys and Demon, Morph - we're working on the problem - don't yet know what caused it - but we are busy investigating ways and means to recover and restore the missing data.

In fact have already recovered the lost posts - but merging these back into the database as it is today (devoid of those posts), without risk of further mangling data is the trick.

Can't tell you anything about hackers in this instance - but these are the lowest form of life and we have had one instance about a year ago where a website was hacked - the hackers left their mark in the form of a html page boasting about their hacking skills! The mentality escapes me!

We carry out backups of all hosted sites on a weekly basis - enough for most websites, but may not be sufficient for a very busy forum like this?

Should have the answers to the problem by tomorrow.

[skybound®]

The 'missing' posts can be merged, but not without some work. IMHO I think the amount of work (and some risk) really outweighs the inconvenience of the loss.

There are just too many tables involved (about 11 of them) and merging them is not an easy straightforward task, and unless done really carefully could end up with the integrity of the current data being compromised.

If you do decide to relocate - do not use Hetzner SA - rather use Hetzner in Germany. Much cheaper in that you get ten times the bandwidth at the same cost as hosting in SA, is the same company, and same SA support numbers etc.

[kb]

Don't have a problem with the contribution - but PLS, remember one thing. If we approach schools / manufacturers etc etc, they are going to want to advertise for this money. The last thing I want, is 73 pop-up's opening when I log on - or recieving 10000 emails from various manufacturers etc on new products that are of no interest to me. If I want a pland / part - I'll get hold of them.

[Morph]

Let's see how the restore goes tommorow, and at this point in time I'm impressed with the level of support and commitment I have got out of EZhost so I would like to give them the benefit of the doubt for now

[KFA]

We are not working with state secrets. I think the value of the data loss does not warrant the trouble and expence. But I must sa, Thank you guys for all the effort going into this forum.

[Bennie Vorster]

Morph, this might help.

http://www.paradigmsolutions.co.za/serv ... osting.asp

http://www.host4africa.com/