I'm going to just state the facts. Please read everything.
As many know we have been trying to get the server upgraded for a long time. We have been wanting Dynmap to come back as well as expanding the server. To do this we needed a hardware upgrade.
Aim2Game ordered that hardware upgrade from the company that they rent the servers from called "Servermania Inc"
Through whatever chain of events, the server went down on March 10th to get the hardware upgrade. Servermania did NOT inform Aim2Game they were going to do this.
Aim2Game finds out that our server is down and begins to figure out what happened to the drive with our data. I'm not sure what happened with it, but they tell me the data was not able to be retrieved, even after hours of trying to recover the deleted data from that drive.
Here is what I know: Everything is gone. Yes, everything. If you are upset, I understand. No one can be as upset as me. I have spent YEARS dedicated to LegitLand. I now have to rebuild everything from the ground up.
We WILL come back online. I will be getting no sleep over the next many days trying to get this all sorted out. We will have a new map. Not only did we lose all of our amazing builds, but I even lost all of my build worlds from all of my YouTube videos and series.
How long will it take? I do not have an answer.
What happens to our donations? I will do my best to compensate when we get the server running 100%
All I ask is for your support during this horrible event. Even though none of it is my fault, I apologize for the inconvenience.
I will try my hardest to have a temporary server up ASAP. We had at least 30 plugins that all worked in harmony. It will not be easy to get them all working together. Everything will be redone. I will be spending hours and hours and hours combing through old permission files and all of the donations.
I'm not entirely sure of the current state of everything. But I am completely sure that we will be back. Hopefully you will come back too. No one could have foreseen this coming. I'm doing my best to make sure that the people who did this to us will make it right to us.
Once again, please bare with us during this troubling period
Email exchange with Aim2Game:
March 10:
Joshua,
The datacenter made the change without any scheduling with us and there is an issue with the server, we're working on it with them and will have more information on what's going on soon. Sorry for the late notice, this took me completely by surprise as there was no scheduled time to install.
Aaron C.
March 11:
Joshua,
I've gotten the full story from the datacenter, the drive upgrade request was completed, however the data from the SSD was lost and even with all of their utilities they have not been able to recover it after several hours of effort.
I feel terrible about this, and would have taken a backup if they had scheduled the upgrade with us as was expected. I am assuming that you do not have any backup of data, even though we are very up-front that we don't take backups on our side without being asked, I've noticed that most of our users do not do them likely due to size issues.
I know it doesn't help, but I will of course give you a full refund of what you just paid since the server data has been lost and credit if there is any interest in that. We've never seen any datacenter operated in this way, it defies all logic for them to shut down a machine and do upgrades during the day with no notice. Text can't even express how upset I am over this, having used datacenters for 15 years and ran a few it's just insane that this happened.
Aaron C.
March 11 (Me replying to the last message):
I'm going to try to keep this as professional as possible.
I'm not quite sure what to say or even where to begin. Not only have I now lost all of the maps and builds that were created since September 2012, I have lost all of the permission files and configs. Not only that but there goes the maps I was using for series on my YouTube channel.
The amount of work that has gone into making my server the way it is can't even be expressed. And now poof. It's gone. Now I have to spend probably weeks of my own time to fix everything.
My server has seen 10,000 unique visitors since moving to aim2game. What's worse is hundreds of players have donated to the server. How can I possibly make this up to them?
Just as you get to blame the Datacenter, I get to blame you. But you guys blaming the Datacenter doesn't make it up to me. Just as me blaming you cannot possibly make this up to everyone in my community who has just lost everything.
This isn't just affecting me. This is affecting hundreds of other players. This will now probably affect my entire community negatively. I can't even imagine how many players will just leave the community that I (and so many others) have worked tirelessly on building.
You feel bad? Try dealing with hundreds of pissed of players. This has now become a complete nightmare for me. I work full time and do YouTube and my server in my spare time. I'm not even sure where I'm going to find the time to fix this mess.
So, tell me: How are you going to make this up to me and the entire LegitLand community?
March 12:
Joshua,
We host big and small minecraft servers, and I do understand the work that goes into them. I hate to see all that effort gone, we have so many users that never backup it's hard to see on a small private server let a lone one like yours with so many users and data.
With regard to how you make it up to your users or the community that is a complicated question. Blame is easy, solutions are hard. Without any kind of a backup from you, from us or from the datacenter we have all failed to be prepared for a drive crash which although it happened during maintenance this time it could have just as easily failed during regular operation too. The datacenter had a responsibility to us to make that data available, and you had a responsibility to your users as the steward of the server. Aim2game has never promised or implied backups exist of any Minecraft server, but as I mentioned we had planned on copying your data to another server but didn't get the chance.
As for your question with regards to LegitLand, we never had any agreement with any entity other than yourself. The only option we have to offer reparations is to you, in the form of a refund of your recent payment and possible credit for future services. We cannot do anything else to recover the data from the original SSD, and no backups exist on our servers of your data. Our business is providing Minecraft hosting, so other than giving you money back the only other thing we can offer is services. I don't know what else we could do that hasn't already been done.
Aaron C.
March 12 (my response to the previous):
I am not implying anything about backups.
I am however implying that your company should have some sort of responsibility.
Now I get to deal with the financial loss not only from my server but from the time I have to take off from YouTube to fix everything. This is part of my business, and now thanks to the carelessness and lack of communication, my business will take a hit. Whilst you assume no responsibility, I must assume the responsibility to the people that rely on my services.
If there is no sort of compensation for this, then you have lost a client.
March 12 (their reply back):
Joshua,
We have full responsibility for what we have agreed to with you. The Terms of Service is a binding agreement meant to hold you and Aim2Game accountable for our respective sides of the business relationship.
In terms of compensation, I'm not sure what you're asking for. If your idea for compensation includes anything related to your efforts building your server, I'm afraid that is where we cannot help you. Any efforts you made on your server should have been protected by yourself, backups are insurance against catastrophe and unplanned events, the more something means to you either personally or financially the more you should do in general to insure it.
Contrary to what you might think there is not that much profit in offering these servers, what I've offered you already is several months profit for us on your server. With any kind of web hosting or game hosting the maximum compensation is going to be very limited, this is part of the reason the services are cheap is because there is a very fixed amount of liability. If that amount of liability was unknown, we would have to charge more and purchase general liability insurance to cover situations such as this. That being said the Terms of Service is very explicit in that we do not offer refunds, and we do not do any backups or guarantee data integrity.
While I think we can both agree you are in a bad place with your server data being gone, I hope you can see that based on our agreement with you in the Terms of Service, we are offering you much more than we are legally bound to do.
Aaron C.
March 12 (my reply back):
I understand your TOS.
Please cancel all products and services I have with Aim2Game.
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Current status: Looking for a new hosting company.
Last edited by jfreeze256 on Mon May 26, 2014 9:46 pm; edited 6 times in total
