Security is in place, monitoring is being set up, and all sites are being tested as time permits.

Please let us know if you notice anything amiss throughout the DE Network.

We sincerely apologize for yet another long stretch of downtime. Funding is nil at the moment, and we have no redundant web server in case of emergencies. As it is, we had to wait for our old server to be shipped to a different facility so that our existing data could be made available. Unfortunately we could not make it work on the server it was moved to (OpenVZ, the technology we previously moved away from), and as a result had to find a new provider and transfer all of our data there instead.

We’re back up, we’re Xen-powered, and we’re hard at work on our server technology here at DE, two concurrent projects at Fallout Games, several open source .NET tools and libraries at SingularityShift, our debut sci-fi novel at digiPress, and some new electronic music from [broken] at Shattered Audio.

Don’t forget to bookmark Technology Kills, Ben McClure‘s blog.

Stay tuned for future updates around the DE Network, as well as a new Digital Empire site to tie them all together.

Without going into too much detail, or damning our previous providers, suffice it to say that it was taking well over a month to get two new servers stood up to replace two overseas servers–before the process was even complete they decided to go ahead and terminate one of our most important servers without prior notification and before we had a new server to move everything to. That was the final straw after a long string of problems receiving customer support, and we started moving elsewhere immediately.

As can be expected with such an emergency move, we’ve had to make some major underlying changes to our environment and some things may have gotten broken, whether it is obvious or not to us yet.

• We are on all Xen servers now, instead of OpenVZ. There should be no difference to our visitors, but on the back-end this makes administration and management much simpler, and much more akin to standard dedicated servers.
• We have decided to go with a third-party DNS service provider instead of continuing to front the cost of running our own geographically redundant nameservers. So far, this has meant cost savings and greater performance and reliability in resolution of our domains. We are on five different nameservers located at 5 different datacenters, so there should never be any single point of DNS failure.
• We’ve completely ditched Apache 2 in favor of LiteSpeed Web Server which is proving to be hugely advantageous–we’re getting much better web performance, and the environment is much simpler to administer.
• We have upgraded our WordPress and Drupal environments, collapsing the many instances of each into a single instance of both applications that hosts content for all of our WordPress and Drupal sites. This has made them easier to update and maintain, and they are performing well so far.
• As a result of the above, everyone can now finally have a single login for all of our WordPress sites, and a single login for all of our Drupal sites (and yes, you can still link both to an OpenID). I apologize, but more likely than not you will have to sign up for the site again–if you really would like your previous account to exist, let me know and I will manually migrate it over.
• Our monitoring system had to be rebuilt from the ground up. Thanks to Zabbix’s sane defaults, we’re mostly up and running, but it will take some time before we are fully monitoring our entire environment again. If you notice anything is down or not working properly that we haven’t fixed yet, please let us know!

We appreciate everyone sticking with us through this transition, and we’re in a much better place now than we were before the move.

This is an unfortunately long and drawn-out process involving a lot of moving pieces. So far, we have switched to a new provider, expanded our single server to several distributed servers, and moved our nameservers onto separate machines in separate subnets and different geographic locations.

Happily, this has helped to provide an unprecedented amount of uptime over the past several weeks. It has also allowed us to stand up blogs and other web services for many of our partner sites without a hiccup. Unfortunately, we have experienced some growing pains however, and this afternoon we’ve had some issues with uptime.

This should all be cleared up anytime now, if not already. We believe (but would like to know for sure!) that our provider is taking care of some long-standing firewall issues, which would potentially explain the temporary downtime, and would bring us one giant step closer to being fully secure and in a “transaction-ready” production state.

What does this mean for our viewers and other users? Well, several things:

1. We can roll out our secure client portal for providing a customer access point and finally allowing us to automate invoicing and orders again
2. DE WebHost can finish revamping their packages and ordering system around the client portal and re-open for business, providing the same service that hosts all of our sites to everyone for outstandingly great prices.
3. DE Domains will flip over to Production and actually be able to accept domain orders securely.

While not related to this issue, we can also roll out a large number of other services that have been hanging in limbo while we get our infrastructure updated. These include:

• A new PC GameSource site. Recently we threw a blog up to allow PC GameSource to continue to post articles and other information. We are also working on a full-featured, community-driven PC gaming site that will ultimately be the home to PC GameSource’s news, reviews, previews, a directory of games and game mods, and much more.
• A revamped DE Forums service so that we can get some proper forum discussions going on around the DE network!
• A new theme and tons of new content over at FalloutModSorter.com. Shortly there-after, a new release of FOMS 2 will be made available as well.
• Much more! We can’t tell you everything we’re working on yet, but soon you’ll know, and we think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Stay tuned as we continue to ramp up our infrastructure and roll out new sites and services. The Digital Empire is back, baby!

More information to come shortly, along with a new website and a new Clients section at DE Billing.

Additionally, if anyone was experiencing DNS resolution issues (which we were ourselves at times), this move has completely resolved that. We now have multiple separate physical nameservers at multiple providers.

In addition, the Shattered Audio blog, Fallout Games blog, and digiPress blog have all been stood up. Expect more network sites to pop up over the coming days.

Our new service, DE Domains, is under construction, and will soon be offering great domain names for excellent prices — many of these are domains we purchased for services we never decided to finish, so now we’re offering them back to the community.

Many of our sites have their own blogs which you should also check out:

• DE’s founder, Ben McClure, has his own blog titled Technology Kills. Here, I (Ben) will cover pretty much everything I do, so it’s a good starting point.
• PC GameSource has set up the new PC GameSource Blog where they are posting news, reviews, and articles related to PC gaming.
• FOMS (Fallout 3 Mod Sorter) also has a blog on its own site where the developers post release info as well as other articles.

We will always try to link to and keep up with the latest news from all of our network sites here.