Hello lovely people, we are back!!

As you may well have noticed, all of our websites including Transformers At The Moon, TransformersAnimated.com, Lucky Draw Transformers, The Visionaries.net, AFA Transformers etc have been offline for the last few days.  This was caused by a series of major hardware failure on our hosted dedicated server.

On Thursday the website went offline as the database crashed and could not recover. This crash was caused by the failure of one of the servers disks.  As well as the disk failing the RAID card which controlled the disks also failed.  This caused corruption to occur within the database.  We had some new hardware fitted but any new RAID card could not read either of the disks which were left nor could the old controller rebuild the RAID array with replacement disks.

Our hosting provider said that they would replace all of the damaged hardware but we would loose everything on the server.  It was at this time we discovered that our backups of the database had also been corrupted and/or were missing information and had been for some time.

We decided to bring forward the introduction of a new server whihch is something we have been planning for a while but did not have the time to focus on migrating the websites to the new server and also migrate our hosted email solution away to a third party provider to reduce load on the server and save some hassle.

So on Friday, before and after work as well as during lunch, we migrated all of the data and files (well over 100GB) between the two servers as well as synchronising all of the database files and images offline (just over 50GB for a highly compressed backup).  The new server was set-up and the database records were recovered after a few attempts and some fun with the old server not being alive enough to actually backup what it had when I did manage to get the database service running again.

This morning I have run a series of tests over our various websites and have redirected the DNS for all of our domains and emails with the exception of the primary transformertoys.co.uk domain which is currently being migrated.

Whilst there is still some minor set-up which is required, you should find that everything on the website is now working, if it is not, then please get in touch with us via email, Facebook, Google Plus or Twitter.

I'd like to apologise for the downtime as we were down far longer than I hoped.

On behalf of my brother and myself I would like to assure everyone that we have not forgotten about this website. It has been a large part of our lives for the past 14 years (the site turns 15 this coming October making it older than many of our visitors!!). We are currently working on completing some other projects but we have a major revamp planned out for the site which I hope to get to over the spring and into the summer.

Thank you to everyone for all the support over the years, the last server hosted the website from 2008 until today, hopefully this one will last as long if not longer.

Steve AKA Quartz