So, we moved our network infrastructure to a new hoster. We had some trouble with the previous one in the last days of April (and it was not the first time), so we got rid of it and looked for a more reliable one. The migration is done since the early days of May.

Be kind

While investigating the trouble and doing the migration to the new place a landpage was set up to welcome people and tell what’s happening, we posted some announces to usual places like twitter and facebook.

Be proud

Thanks to some improvements shipped with 0.51 release made for resiliency purpose and thanks to the secondary master server we’ve set up last year the game did not suffered from the outage and players were still able to browse online games and play.

Be better

While server was in trouble we discovered the updater experienced some issues we may fix to make it more strong against network issues. It’s all about leveraging the problems to make things better.

While the updater was not working during the transition, people were still able to download the game on usual places like github, indiedb and even the old sf.net. This must not prevent us to make the updater better.

We’ve also set up a more efficient backup, the previous one turned to not be very reliable. That’s never an excuse, cough, cough.

Be humble

In any way, it looks like the previous server hoster company just died.

We have to apologize for the outage since we would have been able to do the migration before. There is no public announce telling the company was going off. We just assume it died because there is absolutely no sign of life from the company anymore and their status pages are now either unavailable, empty or fake, and of course they never answered.

No one had warned us about that issue coming but since the last issue we knew the hoster was really bad and that we had to flee.  We were going to do it one day, we just lacked time to do it before.

That’s why the migration was not really smooth.

Be precise

The complete infrastructure is up and running again:

• website and blog
• forums (see below for details)
• wiki pages
• development activity page
• cdn and primary torrent seed
• primary master server (see server list)
• discord ↔ irc bridge and other irc bots
• mailer (used for forum registration and things like that)

Some services like the secondary master server and secondary torrent webseeds were not affected since they are already hosted elsewhere by definition.

Be transparent

Unfortunately and unlike the last time we were not able to entirely restore the forum, so some posts may be missing and if you registered after august 2018 you may have to register again.

While we were migrating to a new host we also upgraded our system. The forums currently experience problems with pictures as the new php version deprecated some features the forum software relies on. An update will be done to fix this.

Be confident

The new hoster looks to be far more solid than the previous one so we hope to not face again this kind of issue before a long time now.

Also, the new hardware looks very performant, so maybe it will allow us to set up an automated asset build bot? That would make us awesome in space !

PS: thanks to eingousef< for those awesome gifs taken from Blender Foundation’s Open Movies.