WinWorld

Earlier this evening we sent out communication about a server outage. This is a follow up to that bulletin.

We have been in communication with the technicians at the data center. They verified that two of the three hard drives in the server have failed.

The company that we host the server with is Serverbeach. We have been using their services for over six years and this is the first hardware failure we have had with them. The server that failed was provisioned on January of this year with brand new hard drives. Not only were the drives less than seven months old, the server was installed with a redundant array of hard drives so that if one failed, it could be restored with minimal downtime. It is extremely uncommon for two drives to fail at the same time with no warning. We suspect that this is due to a manufacturing fault that affected that batch of hard drives.

The server will have to be fully restored from backup. This process may take up to 24 hours. First the hardware has to be replaced. We will be installing brand new drives (not from the same batch as was originally used). Then we will reinstall the server operating system. We will then proceed to reconfigure the server as before, reloading all accounts from backups.

The server is backed up every evening at 10pm. Any data that was loaded to the server between 10pm Sunday night and 5pm Monday night is non-recoverable and will have to be reloaded.

We apologize for the inconvenience. We have taken every measure to ensure something like this does not happen (such as utilizing a redundant hard drive configuration) however hard drive failures do occur, which is why nightly backups are made of the server as a fail-safe.

We will continue to release updates via our Facebook and Twitter pages. We will provide further assessment once the server reload is complete.