Yesterday at approx 23h CET we noticed a hacker trying to take control of both our production and test servers. Luckily we were able to fend them off, but after applying security patches the production server refused respond, and did not come back alive after a reboot.

16 hours later and four trips to the data center later we called it quits and gave up on repairing the production server, and started the move to the Amazon Cloud. Something we were planning to do later this year anyway. Members with a keen eye might already noticed we started to use the Amazon Content Delivery Network a few weeks ago to host the images, hosting our servers 'in the cloud' would have been the next logical step.

As this move was rushed, some functionality is still in progress of being restored: hundreds gigabytes of screenshots are being uploaded (at a slow 1mbit/sec), the forums need to be reinstalled, the news engine, and I'm sure bugs will popup from running on a virtual server instead of a dedicated ubuntu linux machine. Fingers crossed, and our apologies for the downtime!