[footose]

admin ( at ) vhoist (dot) com

or

harry ( at ) generationdub (dot) com

These will both go straight to my blackberry.

...

I'd like to start off by apologizing for the downtime we had yesterday. I'm just dropping by all vHoist sites today to make sure everything is working. All administrators will receive an email from me later today regarding the situation.

For the technically minded:

One of our DNS servers failed early morning Monday and caused us to get a new server. Unfortunately this had the adverse side effect of changing our DNS IP Address and "parking" our Domain name. I immediately changed the DNS, but as some of you are aware, it can take up to 48 hrs to propagate across the entire internet, which caused you to see the errors that you have been seeing. Yes, a nightmare for me. Our entire vHoist site was down only for a matter of 30 minutes, however, because of the 24 to 48 (sometimes even 72) hour delay on DNS Propagation it has really affected us for the last 2 days.

For everyone else:

One of our computers died and there may still be a few issues lingering from yesterday. If you can visit vHoist.com from your home PC, but can't see your car parked on your favorite forum, its because your forum's computer hasn't got the "house warming" invitation yet and probably won't know our new address until the end of the day! Hopefully everyone has our new address by the end of the day and we can all have a nice BBQ together poolside

...

This was completely unexpected, and *knock on wood* has been solved permanently.

As I said in the past, vHoist is a free plugin and thus does not generate any income, but I try to fully support it as any other company would a paid product. Since I'm a "one man show" - some items take a little longer than usual.

This is our first (and hopefully last) downtime since our release date of January 1st, 2009, making us have a 99.4% uptime which I consider fairly decent. vHoist itself was technically not even down, but our DNS provider was.

I will be releasing a new vHoist update soon that will include a "check" for activity so that the plugin does NOT mess up your site when our site is down. This is something I have been working on for a while.

ALSO, on the good news side of things, I will be releasing the following in the next 2 weeks:

- Auto Registration for users coming from forums
- "Templates" for different types of vehicles (ATV's, Cars, Trucks, Bikes..)
ie: A bike does not have "interior" mods, thus does not need the car template
- Adding Boats and Bicycles
- Checking for vHoist connectivity (so your site doesn't get error messages)
- PHPBB Plugin
- Facebook addon

Please stay updated via This Thread or of course.. on http://www.vHoist.com

Again, I apologize for the inconvenience and hopefully this has not tainted anyone's opinion of vHoist as we have never had this happen to us before.

Harry Scanlan
http://www.vHoist.com