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Website Was Down

India sanjay Offline
Co-owner of Wildfact
*****
#1
( This post was last modified: 01-11-2019, 02:11 PM by Rishi )

Hello Members

Nothing can be worse than starting the new year with such a bad experience. Due to technical problem from hosting company our forum was down for more than 24 hours. This was the technical problems that is beyond the reach of my expertise. And only the hosting provider can fix/solve it.

I was very paniced and nervous through all this time and was in constant contact with the hosting company. At one time hosting company told me it is also possible that we might have lost everything and they can't get back the websites backup.. that means all thing lost forever.. I was almost screaming on them.. but they have nothing to say. Thank you to God, Jesus, Bhagwan, Allah, Buddha they were able to retrieve the website and able to make it online again.

So lesson learned from this incident is that.. We have to move on some more reliable hosting company. Good hosting company is not cheap and thats why we were avoiding them. We don't make much money from WildFact and hence was not avail to pay for it.

Thanks for reading and supporting us through this hard time.
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Canada Wolverine Away
Regular Member
***
#2

Could be noticed also that icon showing geographical location of the members is probably out of order.
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Panther Offline
Regular Member
***
#3
( This post was last modified: 01-04-2019, 10:23 AM by Panther )

This makes some sense. I just worried for what happened yesterday. Not opening, and saying "we are facing some problems",etc..

Anyways, thanks for preventing problems and saving the forum!
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Malaysia johnny rex Offline
Wildanimal Enthusiast
***
#4

I thought I was blocked from seeing the site. Well, thanks for anyone who solve the problem.
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Finland Shadow Offline
Contributor
*****
#5
( This post was last modified: 01-04-2019, 10:52 PM by Shadow )

Wildfact seems to have facebook profile too. It might be a good way to tell a little bit what is happening if there is an exceptional situation like this one was. Sometimes unexpected things happen and it is good to have some easy backup plan how to give some information, that what is going on :) Like with facebook, costing nothing.
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India sanjay Offline
Co-owner of Wildfact
*****
#6
( This post was last modified: 01-04-2019, 05:42 PM by sanjay )

Thank you Shadow for putting your thought and I completely agree. But most of our member is not following us on facebook. I am thinking to make a request again so that I can inform them in future.
Though I am not sure which social media our member most uses. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram Or anything else?
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Finland Shadow Offline
Contributor
*****
#7

I think that it doesn't matter so much which media it is as long as it is relatively well known. In that way also non members can easily check situation if there is a problem.
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Rishi Offline
Moderator
*****
Moderators
#8
( This post was last modified: 01-04-2019, 08:58 PM by Rishi )

@sanjay This is not the first time this has happened. Can a data back-up of Wildfact be created? 
Like Carnivora crashed few months ago & their members still have access to the old stuff...

Not sure if you know or not, but i'm a follower/member on this forum. To check how the platform is: defenceforumindia.com/forum/
I think you should also create a profile there & get a feel of it...

I think it's based on tapatalk. The platform is quite reliable & has very very old data, has a buttload of features that MyBB doesn't.
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peter Offline
Co-owner of Wildfact
*****
Moderators
#9
( This post was last modified: 01-04-2019, 10:28 PM by peter )

When Animal Versus Animal (Yuku), where I was a mod, was hacked, I was done with forums. I seriously contemplated selling the computer and returning to paper. Than Sanjay came up with a proposal. I decided to give it one more try.

Never regretted it. I think we created a place of beauty. In this sanctuary, Sanjay is of crucial importance. Apart from being a specialist (a web developer), he's as honest as they come. That and very capable in all departments. Without him, the forum is gone. 

In spite of his effort, the thing we created is vulnarable. The internet is great, but vulnarable. I know it's possible we can lose everything we created. A terrible thing to consider, but possible. The only thing we can do to limit the chance is to find the best possible host.

Quality comes at a price. We make just enough money to pay the bills, but that's about it. If we want to protect what we have, we need a different host. As it's very difficult to increase revenues with ads only, we need to consider a different model to make a bit of money.

Newspapers cost about $1-2 a day and they offer zilch on the natural world. We do and 10 000 - 15 000 views a day from all over the world say there's a need. This is apart from quite many members and readers asking for professional advice.  

I've been thinking about a different model. One with subscribers paying a monthly fee. I'm not saying the entire forum will disappear behind the decoder, but some sections and threads will.

What's your opinion about a paid forum? And what about the fee? You now know we need to do something to get the best possible host in order to limit the chance it will disappear into thin air one day. An additional advantage of more income is we can buy access to good information (magazins) and pay those who invest a lot of time and knowledge into the forum.

Let us know what you think.
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India sanjay Offline
Co-owner of Wildfact
*****
#10

@Rishi
I think carnivora platform shut down their operation and they gave some time to their customer to take the backup and other things... Our problem was different, it was sudden failure of server at which our site are hosted. Since we are using  a cheap hosting company we don't have some very good option of taking backup becasue they charge extra for that.

A good hosting company take backup of everything daily and have 2nd mirror server ready for any emergency.

I take backup manually of everything in between 2-3 months interval but thats not good. Since our forum get lot of content everyday, the backup taken yesterday will miss the today's update. So manual update is not viable solution.

Its better to take some paid service for this.

Now the forum you told is made on xenforo which is a premium forum software and it cost $160 to get software. In this $160 you get software, license and support for 1 year. Then if you need updates and support after 1 year you need to pay some amount again. Since it is premium it has very nice functionality but at the same time most of its good functionality comes as addon which you need to buy separately.

If any how I purchase it, migrating the existing data to other platform is another major headache and I am sure we will miss one or two thing.

Though, In today's world, I agree MyBB is an old game and its not good option anymore, If you have money I suggest to go for premium solution.



There is lot of other premium forum software, but I think all of them are expensive, even more than Xenforo.
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India sanjay Offline
Co-owner of Wildfact
*****
#11

(01-04-2019, 10:21 PM)peter Wrote: I've been thinking about a different model. One with subscribers paying a monthly fee. I'm not saying the entire forum will disappear behind the decoder, but some sections and threads will.

What's your opinion about a paid forum? And what about the fee? You now know we need to do something to get the best possible host in order to limit the chance it will disappear into thin air one day. An additional advantage of more income is we can buy access to good information (magazins) and pay those who invest a lot of time and knowledge into the forum.

Let us know what you think

That is one of the possibility. If you are creating something unique which can not be found easily on internet and its original, you can make a subscription model.
We can say $5 a month or $50 a year for a section(Also advertisement free) of forum where only well researched and thoroughly written content is produced by member(Hard work). And we should have a rewarding scheme for those who are writing the original.
Though I think we should take feedback of our member about this as well.
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India parvez Offline
Tiger enthusiast
*****
#12

Oh my god I can't imagine all the stuff and creative works lost forever. We surely need a back up or shift to better platform. God saved us. Let us search for better platform where there is back up or the stuff is not lost.
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