4webhelp/cyberwings

[John R]

Seeing as 4webhelps site is down, has cyberwings pulled the plug on them, been a while since i last had time to have a lok over there but have heard about cyberwings pulling a bit of a fast on just what they had/were.
Or has the plug been pulled from under cyberwings....

[Justin]

It's a very long and very complicated story to be honest, more like a Soap Opera than a hosting company lately, you may want to check :

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.p...&threadid=61019

Although there is a LOT of reading there, basically they have took all the servers down, and some have been down for 3 weeks, and the rumours are saying that it's because Shawn hasn't paid the bills.......

Cheers

[John R]

Oh dear what a sad mess :S I had looked at getting a reseller account with them when 4webhelp moved there as it looked such a good deal, but lucky for me my finances were a tad too tight at the time so i stuck with my main host (Easily). Always seemed a bit odd to me that just about every week there was a special offer on the go, now we know why he needed the funds to pay the bills...
As the saying goes you get what you pay for... ( . I feel sorry for all those sucked into the scam and have lost everything they worked on...

[Matt]

Surely these people kept a copy of all of their work on their local computer/network?! Its absolute madness to just leave your entire site on a server with no local copy. For starters what do you do if you want to update? Download a copy then re-upload it? Edit it in-situ?!

Seriously, if you guys are running sites without a local caopy, make a copy now...things happen on the internet....

[Justin]

Originally posted by Matt@Jul 22 2002, 06:57 PM
Surely these people kept a copy of all of their work on their local computer/network?! Its absolute madness to just leave your entire site on a server with no local copy. For starters what do you do if you want to update? Download a copy then re-upload it? Edit it in-situ?!

Seriously, if you guys are running sites without a local caopy, make a copy now...things happen on the internet....

Yeah, this websites DB is backed up every 48 hours or so, so if we do have any problems, we always have a recent back-up, which is the way that things should be done in my opinion.

Keeping Backups should always be done, as well as keeping a load of stuff on the PC that you design/code it on.

[Justin]

Originally posted by John R@Jul 22 2002, 06:35 PM
Oh dear what a sad mess :S I had looked at getting a reseller account with them when 4webhelp moved there as it looked such a good deal, but lucky for me my finances were a tad too tight at the time so i stuck with my main host (Easily). Always seemed a bit odd to me that just about every week there was a special offer on the go, now we know why he needed the funds to pay the bills...
As the saying goes you get what you pay for... ( . I feel sorry for all those sucked into the scam and have lost everything they worked on...

Yeah, I could have easily hosted this site there, but instead I decided to host with a host that I knew and trust, because I knew it suddenley wouldn't go down one day like Cyberwings have, I always have been suspicious of Cyberwings, and never did recommend them, I have a few sites there, but not the important ones.

It was obvious what the sales were for, a company gets on Shawn's back, and then he has to generate some cash quickly, so he does with a sale, it doesn't help things in the Long Term, but keeps the companies off his back for a week or two, and he does this cycle over and over again, unfortunatley it looks like this time he ran our of time and cash.

Cyberwings is a scam, and I just feel sorry for people that have fell through it, although the hosting fees got you some entertainment in their chat room that was worth a LOT more, it's like a Soap-Opera in there at the moment!

[John R]

Originally posted by Matt@Jul 22 2002, 05:57 PM
Surely these people kept a copy of all of their work on their local computer/network?! Its absolute madness to just leave your entire site on a server with no local copy. For starters what do you do if you want to update? Download a copy then re-upload it? Edit it in-situ?!

Seriously, if you guys are running sites without a local caopy, make a copy now...things happen on the internet....

We all know you should....remember all the fuss from folks who lost everything when one of f2s's server went tits up.... :O .Trouble is a lot of the folks who take up with the likes of cyberwings are reletive newbies who are just moving up from their free space, but dont want to fork out a lot of cash in case they get in too deep.
In the main backups are a balancing act when you have a forum running on your site. The main one i mod at does it every day (We are lucky we're running a dedicated server with plenty of space and a back up server located elsewhere just in case) even then we can lose 100's of posts, but most will do it once a week or even once a month, a busy forum can soon lose many of posts in that time...
We all know it will never happen to us dont we..... :ninja:

[Matt]

I wonder how many newbies will have a busy forum on their site :-)

Just for the record, I have the website on my computer and a copy on the server if you know what I mean :-) Been doing it like this for about 7 years now and its never let me down. Update the site on your hard drive then upload the changes to the online copy.

[Justin]

Originally posted by Matt@Jul 22 2002, 10:21 PM
I wonder how many newbies will have a busy forum on their site :-)

Just for the record, I have the website on my computer and a copy on the server if you know what I mean :-) Been doing it like this for about 7 years now and its never let me down. Update the site on your hard drive then upload the changes to the online copy.

Yeah, I know what you mean Matt, although for dynamic stuff like forums, you also are going to need a back-up of the db from the host, as you're not going to have that on your computer.

But for the static html stuff, I always have changed it on the HD, and then uploaded the changed, I have a copy of apache on here now, so I can pretty much test things on here before I upload.

Just hope not many users lost too much data!

[Justin]

Originally posted by John R@Jul 22 2002, 08:54 PM
[We all know you should....remember all the fuss from folks who lost everything when one of f2s's server went tits up.... :O .

Trouble is a lot of the folks who take up with the likes of cyberwings are reletive newbies who are just moving up from their free space, but dont want to fork out a lot of cash in case they get in too deep.

In the main backups are a balancing act when you have a forum running on your site. The main one i mod at does it every day (We are lucky we're running a dedicated server with plenty of space and a back up server located elsewhere just in case) even then we can lose 100's of posts, but most will do it once a week or even once a month, a busy forum can soon lose many of posts in that time...
We all know it will never happen to us dont we..... :ninja:

Yeah, but that F2S Server did come back up in the end, although it was a few weeks before it did, but to their credit they did back the free servers up, as I remember server 44 "going fzzzzzzzz" and Chris uploaded all the data to a new server and restored it.

Cyberwings of course is cheap and nasty hosting to put it nastily, and it's ideal for moving up from free space to your first paid host, but for serious sites, I'm afraid it is not ideal at all.

The backups on here are done every 48 hours by myself, and we're also working on an automatic back-up script to back up the db. The host backs up quite often too, so we're lucky with that. This doesn't have many users on either to be honest, hence why it's so quick despite being in the states.

Although server failiures just don't happen with ecommercediscovery!

[php4ever]

I am quite curious to know what the team behind 4webhelp.net is going to do now. 4webhelp provided a very much needed service, both for users of f2s as well as Internet newbies. I used that site countless times and found it to be a most valuable resource. B/c of 4webhelp.net I took the time to learn more about the Apache web server. And, when I was having trouble occasionally accessing the db or email @ f2s, I knew I could always turn to 4webhelp.net for assistance.

4webhelp.net had a most remarkable voluntary team. Theirs is a site that must be resurrected and hosted at a more stable hosting company.

I sure hope 4webhelp will be back soon!

Regards,
php4ever

p.s. And, I am most grateful that us users @ f2s at least still have freedom2support.co.uk. Justin, thank you for having the foresight to make freedom2support.co.uk available.

p.s.s. I almost signed up with CyberWings and only didn't b/c of an intuition born of having worked 4 2 many dot-coms that pulled ridiculous shenanigans to stay afloat and somehow still managed to sink.

[Justin]

Originally posted by php4ever@Jul 23 2002, 01:10 AM
I am quite curious to know what the team behind 4webhelp.net is going to do now. 4webhelp provided a very much needed service, both for users of f2s as well as Internet newbies. I used that site countless times and found it to be a most valuable resource. B/c of 4webhelp.net I took the time to learn more about the Apache web server. And, when I was having trouble occasionally accessing the db or email @ f2s, I knew I could always turn to 4webhelp.net for assistance.

4webhelp.net had a most remarkable voluntary team. Theirs is a site that must be resurrected and hosted at a more stable hosting company.

I sure hope 4webhelp will be back soon!

Regards,
php4ever

p.s. And, I am most grateful that us users @ f2s at least still have freedom2support.co.uk. Justin, thank you for having the foresight to make freedom2support.co.uk available.

p.s.s. I almost signed up with CyberWings and only didn't b/c of an intuition born of having worked 4 2 many dot-coms that pulled ridiculous shenanigans to stay afloat and somehow still managed to sink.

Hey,

I'll contact Daniel at 4webhelp.net sometime later today, because as you may know, I'm a moderator there, and I don't particuarly know what is going on, but I think the plan is to wait for cyberwings to come back up, although don't quote me on that.

I think it's a valuable resource too, as I use it a lot of the time for web design / php help related to this website, so I do hope it does come back for everyones sake.

I was always suspicious about 4webhelp hosting at cyberwings, and could always see something like this happeneing, but obviously they went with Cyberwings for a reason, and although it would not be my choice, we should respect that.

Thanks for your kind comments about this website, we created it due to demand for more information from freedom2surf becasue that people on the ADSLGuide Forums were demanding a resource like this, and I was glad me and the team could provide it.

I have a few domains with cyberwings, but nothing too serious, because I always could see something like this happening, so I didn't put my main sites on there.

Hope that everything works out soon and this whole fiasco is over soon!

Kind Regards,

[Daniel]

The "plan" for now is to stay with Cyberwings, if they can get us back up within a reasonable time (ie: back up by Thursday at the latest IMO). However, if they fail to do so, we do have a host who is willing to take us on.

Cyberwings have a backup of our whole server, so there is no problem there.

In the meantime, our IRC channel is always open at irc.webchat.org, channel #4WebHelp.

Any other questions?

Edit : Corrected Incorrect use of IBF Tags



<!--EDIT|Justin|Jul 23 2002, 01:54 PM-->

[John R]

Good to see that they will be back up and running again, sometime soon....
Trouble is most folks will have wondered off else where as there is no way of keeping folks upto speed on whats going on...
As Justin said even the mods of the forum are in the dark...And as a formor one i know, that the team keep a lot to themselves at times.
Trouble with the backup is will cyberwings release it or even be able to if the servers are inpounded....

[Daniel]

The backup will simply be stuck on another server, so whether or not Rackshack still has the server or not doesn't matter. The issue for Maine people is quite different, since Cyberwings don't have a backup outside the datacenter.

[John R]

So cyberwings have a backup that they are prepared to let 4webhelp have to move to a new host then. :S . What i ment was looking at the other forum that is linked to above cyberwings have no way of getting any data out of the data center, so unless they have it stored elsewhere its not much use..
Seems one member of the team should have had a backup on their system.. Makes sense to me, never trust your host with your data backups, always keep a local copy.

[Daniel]

You don't seem to understand...

We have a backup, however the database isn't exactly "fresh"... It's a little old...

As to Cyberwings, for the Rackshack servers, they HAVE backups (nothing to do with Maine at all). These backups will be put on new servers soon...

[Justin]

CEO-Shawn - Due to an intermittent equipment failure at our new dc (a piece of equipment we have replaced twice so far in 48 hours), I do not feel comfortable posting the QUESTIONNAIRE to users yet. I want to be sure this piece of equipment (A Media Converter - our router & servers are fine & well) is 100% stable before I proceed.

I do estimate that our questionnaire will be online sometime today (Wednesday) with the ability for users to post information into our database for us to work on.

CEO-Shawn has been working today with our equipment provider to ensure stability on that converter - so far, since it was replaced Tuesday morning at 2:00am, it has been almost 100% stable except for 10 minutes this afternoon when they powered DOWN our circuit while replacing fiber tips that were deemed questionable.

CEO-Shawn wants to be able to deliver 100% stable, non-questionable stability and I do not want to move ahead quite yet until we fix this one last piece. I hope you all can understand. I will return sometime during the day tomorrow to update everyone and to be here live when the questionnaire goes online. Thanks for everyone's support.

[Daniel]

We have a backup server up right now, which has pretty much everything on it, except all forum posts, as it's too much of a pain to upload them, and it's from 04/07/02

Anyway, the nameservers have been changed, and it's waiting for propagation...

Hopefully the CW servers will be up soon...

[John R]

Its back up and running now, i see

[Justin]

Originally posted by John R@Jul 24 2002, 09:58 PM
Its back up and running now, i see

Not for long though.........

[Daniel]

OK, the old server will be up for a little more than an hour now, so here are the instructions to access the new site before propagation:

(this doesn't work on all OSes)

Add the following to your c:\windows\hosts file (no extension):

212.187.158.4 TAB www.4webhelp.net

And replace "TAB" with a real tab, of course

[Justin]

WINDOWS NT, 2000 and XP PRO USERS :

The hosts file can be found in C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\Etc\hosts