Full Details
Site Outage Information
On Tuesday, 23 April, Worlds Without End went down as the result of a malware attack on our hosting service A2 Hosting. The attack was not aimed at WWEnd, nor did it affect our site or data directly, but was widespread among A2's clients and they were forced to shut down their machines to keep the malware from spreading to other clients. The site came back online and went down again several times over the next few days and finally stabilized on Friday evening the 26th.
The database server was corrupted and A2 was only able to bring us back online with an old backup dated from mid February. Needless to say this is not ideal for WWEnd or our members as we have lost a ton of data including member records, new books, authors, and publishers, member reviews, member book taggings, awards updates, and site updates. It was our hope that they would be able to restore us to a more recent backup but they apparently cannot.
We do, however, have our own off-site data backup from March 31st that we will be uploading to the site this week. It's not going to save everything that was lost but it's a month and a half more recent than what's currntly on the site and will save us much toil and grief.
Once we get the March 31st backup data uploaded to the site we can begin the task of assessing what is missing and start to repair the broken things around the site. We'll be able to start entering in all the missing data and pick back up with regular requests.
As soon as the data is up we will begin the process of transferring the site to a new host service. A2 is obviously not reliable and their response to the crisis was less than optimal to say the least. When we find our new host we'll have to take the site down again for a little bit while we transfer everthing over. This will be a controlled outage and we'll let everyone know in advance when we have the details sorted.
This has been a sore trial for everyone involved and we know you are all feeling our pain. Many thanks to everyone for the kind words of support and commiseration during this disaster. We ask for your continued patience and supprt while we set things to rights over the next few weeks. We wish it could be done faster but we have our day jobs and real life to contend with so be prepared for inevitable delays and hickups.
There is a forum thread where we will be posting updates as we go along and you can post your questions and comments there: Unable to access site...now problems
If you want to read about the outtage at A2 there is an article here: Customers furious over days-long outage as A2 Hosting scores a D- in Windows uptime
Other folks are as unhappy as we are: Consumer Affairs
Thanks again and wish us luck!
