The GWE Forum was down! What Happened?!

[Tika]

So very very happy the forum is up and running again! Indeed I missed my happy space filed with good people.
Thank you for your unyielding effort and dedication - you are truly remarkable people.

[Beach_Town_Brit]

Great to have the forum back, thanks for all the travails.

[SiriusFourside]

Guess who learned a new word today!

Edit: Make that two; Nebula didn't know it, either.

Edit 2x: Also, thanks and welcome back. Learning a new word distracted me...

[Zativa]

Thanks for your efforts, have been missing my regular info fix here. GWE is by far the most user-friendly source of information I've found on this topic.

A specific question: will things we post in this forum be indexed and show up on search engines?

[NebulaHaze]

Yes, they do. So please use a fake name and be careful not to reveal any personal information when posting on the forum. Stay safe!

[Blazed227]

Thank goodness we're back up an running¡!!!!!! Been lost with out ya guys;!!

[jeff1961]

So far that I seen,this is the best site, glad your back, thank you

[Ergot]

Thanks for your efforts it's much appreciated

[Flexy123]

Hello!

NEVER host a professional/commercial site or a site with high traffiic on a hoster like godaddy/hostgator etc...and absolutely not any "shared" hoster. (Which most "normal" hosters are). If you have any site where your business depends on, always get a VPS. (Without getting too technical, it means that everything is under your control and you don't share resources, and the hoster can't also turn off your service. There is also no database limits or whatever other limits, because you basically have an entire server for yourself).
I have some wordpress sites which are getting FAR less traffic than yours (I am sure , and I am using a a SSD VPS from Ramnode (not related to them in any way), it costs me $30/month + $13 for the Cpanel license. So if you ever need a reliable hoster consider them. (Of course there are more, but they are among the cheapest and always reliable).
Also..that Godaddy refused to give you your data and then gave you 4 minutes for 78GB (WUT?? How did that work?) makes me rage just reading this...

Cheers, G.

[NebulaHaze]

Thanks for commiserating! It sounds like you completely understand our pain. As I'm sure is obvious, we are not technical people! We had no idea the community would grow so fast and people would submit so many awesome and high-quality pictures. After the database blew up, we went to a professional hosting company, upgraded everything, and now we have a dedicated server hosting just the forum

[Flexy123]

Yeah it sucks when stuff like this happens, but I am glad you have sorted it out!
PS..yesterday I had a hard time to even find a hint on your main page that the forum even exists...until I saw that you get to it by clicking on this banner-thing there.
I could be wrong, but you could possibly get more traffic to the forum (if that's what you want) with a more obvious link from the main page. Just my $0.02

[NebulaHaze]

Yes, that's a good point. We do eventually plan to promote the forum more (by putting a nice prominent link at the top), but we just want to make sure everything is running smoothly before we open the floodgates