Burningstorm Studios

Looks like we are mostly back up. Two days ago, April 03, 2017, we had a massive failure with the server. I took some upgrades to the server and and was wholly unsuccessful in restoring functionality. Unfortunately, the server image had some massive issues and I was forced to rebuild the server. I've been working since to rebuild and restore data from the last successful backup.

Unfortunately, I have not been successful in recovering our source control repository. I have backups of all the code so thats no real loss, however I am still working to restore the repository and history.

Server may be a little unstable while I work on restoring functionality. Hopefully I'll have this resolved by Friday.

We're regularly getting a lot of spam and hacking attempts from the countries of China and Pakistan. Since I am having a difficult time stopping the spam registrations despite all the changes I make, as of today, these countries are blocked at a firewall level from accessing any of our services. I doubt we will have any legitimate users from either of these countries in the future as everything we do will likely only be localized in English until we have a bigger following.

If you are a legitimate user in one of these countries, well you won't be reading this, but should you find a way around it, I apologize, but I'm afraid you're out of luck. You'll need to access this site using a VPN as I'm not going to be changing this ban anytime soon.

Cleaned up a lot of spam today. Let me know if you via the contact us link at the bottom of the page, if you got caught up in the spam cleanup.

It's that time of the month again!

I will be preforming server maintenance tonight, this time on odyonline.com, burningstormstudios.com, and forum.burningstormstudios.com. Expect outages for at least a few hours after 7:00 PM CST.

Big plans for tonight are migrating the forum to XenForo and cleaning up the forums a bit (so many stale announcements and stickies). Steven and I have discussed this before and I think I'm going to go ahead and do this now while the community is still small.

Our host will be preforming maintenance on the box our server is located on Wednesday February 12, 2014 between 8:00 PM - 9:00 PM CST. During this time, our sites and services will be inaccessible.

I will be preforming some server maintenance starting at about 6:00 PM CDT Friday, December 13, 2013. I have hopes to be done that same night, but depending on how things turn it out, it may be longer.

During this time, I will be updating the server, installing a better spam filter on these forums, migrating server configuration to a new system, and many other miscellaneous things I've been putting off for awhile. During this time, most if not all, domains will likely give a welcome page, appear offline, or a give generic maintenance mode message. Please disregard any messages like this.

I will also likely be bringing a new version of the odyssey website online this weekend. It will likely have a very generic template, but I need to the new backend up for further testing. I hope to have the downloads and the news online (hopefully pulling news directly from the Odyssey subforum so I no longer have to maintain two places) at the same time but I've not coded that yet so give it a...

Things have been very slow since the turn of the new year. Work picked up for me and I have been pretty worn out. Things have gotten better and I've started progress on things again. I've been looking at where we stand right now and decided to update a few things.

Our hosting expires in 60 days. I've been with Bluehost for about 3-4 years now. They've been good for simple hosting, but it's time we moved on. I am going to slowly begin moving over this and all other sites I own over to a Linode VPS. This will give me more control over the entire site as well as run custom software without having to schedule a cron job to keep it up. I am going to start with the Odyssey site and end with this site and the forums. During this time, there will be downtime on both. If any site suddenly stops responding, ignore it and try again later.

Secondly, during this time, I am also refreshing our websites. I have been evaluating different PHP frameworks and settled on Laravel. It's fairly...

A lot of people are complaining they cant register? Know anything about it Mycal? - or if there is a quick fix?

We now have new layouts on the Main website, the Forums, and even our mobile layout (if you visit the forums from a mobile device) have been upgraded. Small tweaks will still be made especially with the Logo and icons here and there but it is complete for the most part.

I've just received an e-mail that my hosting contract with Bluehost is set to expire in 60 days. While I've been here for a year and I like the features, I'm going to be evaluating other solutions that I've heard about since moving to Bluehost, in particular HostICan. They seem to have what we want for a reasonable price. I just need to ask them a few questions to ensure they can meet a few special needs of ours that Bluehost currently cannot without paying a good deal more.

Features we need:
- Unlimited or really high Space/Bandwidth
- Unlimited domains/subdomains
- PHP4/5, MySQL (preferably unlimited), Ruby, etc
- SSH access (very important)

Things we would like:
- SSL certificate (extra ~$10/month at Bluehost)
- Dedicated IP (extra ~$10/month at Bluehost)

It seems HostICan has a base package that has everything we want for only $14.95/month (for a full year), a full $20/month cheaper than what we would pay for at Bluehost.

This shouldn't affect uptime of anything yet as I...