As many of you know, The Scholars of Shen Zhou was offline for a few days (from approximately 7/22/02 to 7/25/02).
As explained below in a letter from our former host (Cadenet), the server box that SoSZ was hosted on failed and the hard drive the site was on was destroyed. Along with that hard drive, the backup hard drive was also destroyed. We are not sure if we believe this, but there is not much we can really do about it. We have left Cadnet in favor of another provider; they were having stability issues anyway.
The new host should be stable and reliable. If not, we will move to another host in an attempt to keep things stable and reliable. The forum database will now be updated with greater frequency to make sure that future problems are not major.
The forum has been restored to the same state it was at on 7/8/02, this means about two weeks of content has been lost. I apologize for this, but unfortunately content posted (including your post count) cannot be restored. I hope everyone will continue to be a part of our forum.
-James
Dear Customer,
Thank you for taking the time to read this email and for your patience with your CadeNet holly account. We would like to sincerely apologise for the recent problems that you have been facing because of the server crash we recently encountered with the holly server. Our technicians have been working on it for hours trying to determine the problems with this system and we have now unfortunately discovered that both our master drive, where
your data is stored, and our backups have both been destroyed. As you may or may not be aware we have spent months developing contingency plans and redundancies for such an event, however the knocking out of both the hard drive and the backup system was totally unexpected and devastating.
This server failure was totally unexpected and this unfortunately means that your account and your clients accounts, should you be a reseller, are unfortunately lost. We are trying to restore as much as we can from the backups that we have but we are unsure as to how much we can take off this drive. I realise that this is not good enough and we are very sorry that this has happened but we will do everything possible to resolve the situation. If you have your own backups we will happily restore them to the new server immediately, simply visit http://www.cadenet.net/deskpro and create a new ticket with your backup. I also realise that nothing that we can do can realistically make amends for this terrible failure however I would like to offer all those clients who are willing to stay with us 2 months free hosting, or 1 month's refund and 1 month free.We are in the middle of setting up a new server for all our holly customers, named elizabeth, and this is on even higher specifications then our previous server. It is 2 x 36GB SCSI, 1GB RAM, Dual PIII, Network Backup and Backup drive. This new system is in our original Network Operations Centre and technicians will be monitoring it with even greater effort over the following months.
We will have the new server, elizabeth, up and running within 24 hours and will then guarantee a full 100% server running time, excluding scheduled down times for maintenance, which are always posted well in advance and connection issues outside our control. If we do not keep to this promise we will offer a days credit for every hour the servers are down. Once the new server is running you will be able to upload your backups, we will be happy to do this for you if required. You should receive your login details for your account within 24 hours and we will help you at all stages with getting your account back up to speed, our technicians are available 24 hours a day to assist you.
With this server issue we have identified flaws in our own communication and our planning and we will be devoting a lot of resources into making sure that this never happens again. As Customer Service Manager I cannot apologise enough for our lack of communication during this outage and I would like to promise all our customers that this was unacceptable and will not happen again.
Please feel free to contact me personally by email on csm@cadenet.net or John.Bradshaw@cadenet.net and I would be more then happy to telephone you or correspond via email to explain the situation further and help you as much as possible.
John Bradshaw
Customer Service Manager (CSM)
CadeNet Communications Ltd