All,
Around the 10th of June, a number of upgrades to the old website server failed. Compounding this issue, the source scripts that are bundled with
SAM and hosted on the website server (essentially enabling a lot of the 'currently playing' information that is displayed) were subject to a vulnerability. This brought the website server down and offline, sadly during
DJ HM's excellent
HM 5 session.
As the website server is physically unconnected to the broadcasting of the music, S.A. continued to stream without any issues whilst the website server was offline and the amount of listeners tuned-in on any given day remained high.
As I've mentioned in passing a number of times recently here on the forum, I have specking-out a new, more powerful website server to host the site and forum - as S.A. continues to increase in popularity and the functionality and information that is displayed on the website becomes more complex, so does the load on the website server itself. As such, S.A. had out-grown the website server platform that it was on.
Even though at the time of this crash I was already in the process of migrating to a new, far more powerful dedicated website server, the migration to this new server was greatly hindered by the extremely poor response times from both the old website server company and the Domain Name Registrar that the name
www.stellar-attraction.com is managed by. This involved serveral daily phone calls and e-mails to these companies requesting that the old, offline website be discontinued and that the details of S.A.'s domain name be updated to 'point' to the new website server.
This proved to be an extremely frustrating experience for me personally, resulting in my contacting
ICANN to advise them of this lack of response from the companies involved in order for me to control my own domain name. This left the S.A. website offline for far longer than necessary with the new, active website server online and ready-to-go but without the domain name pointing to it. It was only at this point that both companies eventually started to return phone calls (rather than simply continuously advising me that my issue had 'been escalated') and reply to my e-mails.
Needless to say, any relationship that I held with the companies involved has now been terminated.
Sincere apologies for the inconvenience of not having the S.A. website online for such an extended period of time and please rest assured that I worked constantly to resolve the numerous problems involved.
D