Wow, time sure flies! I can’t believe that January is practically over already. Though I suppose it’s easy to lose track of time when you’re busy dealing with a bunch of wacky antics courtesy of an unresponsive web host.
What happened?
For those of you who don’t know, at some point around the 29th of December, RanGen’s web host, Falcoda Internet, went down, taking RanGen and who knows how many other sites with it. For about 5 days (in RanGen’s case) the site was inaccessible, replaced with a screen claiming that RanGen’s hosting plan had been deactivated.
The aftermath
After two weeks of scrambling around, copying and pasting, backing up files, setting up temporary measures, trying to figure out what was going on, and searching for a new web host, RanGen is back up and running, though there’s still a lot of loose ends left to tie off. I was in the middle of a whole bunch of stuff before all of this went down!
But, here we are. Now we get to try out a whole new web host. We’ll see how 123 Reg does in comparison to Falcoda. Fortunately, despite the inconvenience (and the loss of ad revenue) RanGen has pulled through relatively unscathed. I saw dozens of negative messages on social media and Trust Pilot from others who were affected and came out much, much worse.
So far nobody seems to know what happened and Falcoda is not responding to anyone. As far as we can tell, the business seems to have just… collapsed. Many of us recently bought or renewed our hosting plans, but now we can no longer get our money’s worth nor get refunds. This is just the beginning of a long battle, I think. There’s a lot of complaining and writing stiff letters to do.
New feature rollout – Save your results!
Before all hell broke loose, I was in the process of updating all of the Gens to enable the new, unique, never-before-seen ability to save your results in the form of screenshots, text files, and copying directly to the clipboard. So far, a handful of the Gens have this feature enabled, including the Appearance, Super Power and Country Gens. This is just one of the steps to make it easier for users to retain their Gen results. This will take a while to implement; I have to go through each Gen one by one to update them. Assuming we don’t have any more interruptions, it shouldn’t take too long. Then I can get back to whatever it was I was doing before that.
The DunGen?
Aside from that, while RanGen was unavailable, I temporarily hosted all the Gens in the DunGen.
For those of you who don’t know, the DunGen is a sister site to RanGen. It’s a place where I intend to host some random bits and pieces that don’t quite fit in here.
Currently, it’s where we’re having our Random Adventure; a fantasy story I’m writing about you, dear reader, and the adventure you find yourself on thanks to the machinations of Gen results, random chance, and public votes. It’s a live example of how you can use the Gens to your advantage when writing, I writing exercise for me, and a fun little romp that has the potential to go completely off the rails, depending on what the votes and the generators say.
While I have my plans and hopes for the story, who knows where things will end up? This is still just the beginning; the true adventure has barely begun! If you’re looking for something to read or want to join the votes, hop over there and enjoy the adventure.
Mail trouble
Lastly, as part of the whole Falcoda collapsing thing, I had mail problems during Christmas and New Year. If you sent me a message during that time there is a chance I didn’t receive it. Or, if I did receive it, I wasn’t able to get my response out to you. Things should be good now so if you didn’t get a response, try sending a message again.
Now then, with that out of the way, time for me to get back to work!
*Slinks away into the shadows once more*
