DATE: 08 SEPTEMBER 2014
SUBJECT: SERVICE DISRUPTION
Restoration Radio Listeners,
I want to make everyone aware that I am well aware of the problems on the site over the last 24 hours which has yielded intermittent access capability, security warnings, dead audio players, or 404 errors which say the site is down. I have been working feverishly to reach a resolution with our domain host on this issue most of the day today. As of 10:50am EDT this morning, I began having website access issues. By 11:10am EDT, I was locked out of our website with the error that security blocks were in place against my IP address. The e-mails began flowing into us from our members who could not access their content. By 12:25pm EDT, I had to activate my VPN system to even gain limited access to our site. Since that time, the website "up-time" has been hit or miss, with a wide variety of security errors and blocks in place. The streaming media players were, and even to this point, all dead.
First of all, I want everyone to know that this is not our fault nor any error on our part. Our domain host, which hosts our server which is based in Dallas, Texas, has experienced a series of malicious attacks on their server systems in the last 96 hours. As it was explained to me, many servers through several domain hosts across the United States have experienced denial of service attacks on their servers, with a much higher than usual server failure due to denial of service across the United States in the last 96 hours.
While it is our responsibility to make sure the site is functional at all times, these things are out of our control. However, it is our responsibility to provide you with constant access to the content for which you have paid, and so I have spent the last 8 hours on and off the phone with our domain hosts and their high-level customer service support to come up with a solution to this problem.
Let me share with you what we are going to be doing in order to ensure that this does not happen again. Beginning tomorrow, I will begin the process to transfer all of our server data over to Cloud based hosting. For the sake of brevity, I am not going to explain what that is; if you want to look it up, Google is your friend. This cloud server migration will ensure that for any hardware failure or scheduled maintenance which results in down time on our website, we will not lose functionality of our site. Everything will be mirrored cloud based servers and we will be able to have continued access if the site goes down due to failure within 5 minutes of the failure.
This migration will begin tomorrow, and our domain host will schedule with me a time to actually complete the migration, which will probably take the site down for 2-6 hours. I will schedule this in the middle of the night in the Eastern Daylight Time zone of the United States so that minimal service disruption is experienced to our members. I will post an announcement on the site for when this migration is scheduled.
In the meantime, our players are still dead right now and our domain host is working the problem. If there is an episode any of our members would like to listen to, please e-mail me and I will e-mail you a secure download link.
Currently, the point-of-purchase system of buy now and add to cart are still functioning correctly.
Please accept my sincerest apologies for the lack of access you might experience until this problem is resolved.
Kindest Regards,
Justin Soeder
Executive Producer
Technical Director
www.restorationradionetwork.com
www.truerestorationmedia.com
