Dreamcast Online at OnlineConsoles.com

Hello everyone, and welcome back after a 9 day blackout. On the evening of December 7th the RAID Controller on the dedicated web server that OC was hosted on failed. This synchronized data between multiple harddrives, namely backup drives incase of a primary harddrive failure. The failure of this device put the entire server out of commission. Luckily all of OC's data was intact, and nothing was lost.

Though, for the majority of the past week and a half I did not have all of the data needed to fully restore the site. It was not a fun time period for me at all.

OC's primary function is to keep technology alive. Not only as a self serving role to maintain its own community, but to preserve the ability to interact over networked game consoles. Situations like these give us a window into the stability of web based services and how that relates to much of what OnlineConsoles is all about. Maintaining websites with a heavy backend infrastructure for the longterm is the real challenge. Catastrophe is inevitable. It is only a matter of "when and how" it will happen. Not only do site admins have to rise to the challenge of fixing problems, but also maintain the site over time to evolve with the ever-changing landscape of the Internet.

Over the weekend I obtained a complete mirror of OC's data, and after several more days of waiting... and waiting, I simply took the situation into my own hands and got the site repaired and running again on a new host. OC is now back and my email should be functioning normally.

This means we are now in a different server environment. Since 2003 OC was hosted on a dedicated machine, with very few other sites competing for server resources. However now, we are on shared hosting, which means site speed and uptime could be impacted more than it has in the past. We do have a few things in our favor though. I designed OC to be very lean on the front end, and years back implemented various caching methods on the backend to speed up the sites overall functionality. In addition to this the webhost I went with has a solid track record, and is aimed more towards technology minded individuals. They don't overload their servers with too many clients.

I don't expect there to be many problems, but I am prepared to deal with them as they arise. As such, I will be relying on you guys (the OC community) to help spot any errors, bugs, or major site crashes that may or may not unfold now that the site is back up and running.

1.) First post any info regarding this in the "OC Support" forum, under the Support area.
2.) If something is broken preventing you from doing that, contact me via email at ben(at)onlineconsoles.com
3.) If niether the site, nor my email is working (which will be highly unlikely at this point), you can reach me on jabber if you already have my jabber id.

I will be working on the site throughout the evening, and I am asking many of you to start actively posting on the website tonight so we can get some posts up to ensure everything is working smoothly.

Thank you all for being patient! Happy Holidays and Let's play some games!

Regards,
-Ben Pekarek
Director/Founder

I just want to thank everyone who contributed donations to help offset the costs of running OC's game servers. For the year running from June 2008 to June 2009, the OC community contributed over $425. This helped to cover roughly 26% of the yearly server fees.

The Servers Page has been updated to show each contributors donations, and is reflected by an anonymous ID number.

I have also reset the donation graphic for 2009-2010. Which so far... we only have had 1 donation since June of this year. So we are off to a very slow start. Only 12 users have been actively contibuting. If you use our game servers, please pitch in a few dollars to help out.

Thanks so much everyone for your continued support!

For many years we have used a automatic post merging feature to merge your post to your most recent one if you were the last person to reply to a thread. However, for a few important reasons we have decided to remove this feature, and encourage members to edit their posts instead, thus allowing for certain situations where double posting is necessary.

A new entry in our Forum Rules has been added on Bumping (Double Posting), and it reads as follows: