If youre wondering why your GuildPortal guild site isnt responding its due to a rather serious hardware issue at the moment. Tuesday the guild website hosting service went down for emergency maintenance, something that seemed innocent and normal enough at first, but later things started to take a more unfortunate turn. The database server company, CBEYOND, suffered a hardware failure which caused the GuildPortal service outage.
Unfortunately, the problem gets worse from there. Normally this could be fixed by replacing the hardware and restoring the backups, but according to an update on the GuildPortal Facebook page, the CBEYOND failed to notice that the GuildPortal backups had misfired for the last two weeks, leaving a two-week old backup to choose from. Of course, if this is what they have to go with, any guild websites or information from that time will be lost.
The post also indicates that the conversation may have gotten a little heated.
"Alright everyone. I insisted that a two week old backup wasn't going to do it, especially after investigating and finding out that backups had failed to run for two weeks and it wasn't triggering any alerts in CBEYOND's central management system. From what I can see now while logged into the database server, the DBA has quit his session and has stopped working on it. That was after he sent a very angry email to me."
This is certainly an unfortunate situation for both players and GuildPortal which hosts a huge number of guild websites in various online games and is possibly the worst outage the service has experienced since its founding. With any luck, the service will get back up and running soon with minimal damage. Just brace yourselves for possible data loss if CBEYOND can't correct the issue.
Update: GuildPortal is back up once again, but the restoration came by way of the two-week old save as expect. So there may be some posts or site work lost from that time.
Sources: Guild Portal Outage Announcement, Restoration Update
