Hi everybody! As many of you are surely aware, we were down for about a week. I’m sure there was quite a bit of speculation about why, so this post is meant to be completely transparent about what happened.

To quell one fear immediately: No, we were not hacked or breached, or anything of the sort.

On October 18th, our hosting provider experienced a hardware failure. Now, they didn’t tell us what specifically the hardware failure was, so I’m just saying that the hardware our website was hosted on exploded, hence the title. Whether or not that’s accurate or not doesn’t really matter, it’s just a little less tense and serious.

In some instances when this happens, data can be recovered but this was not one of those instances. Our data was completely lost, including customer order data, theme modifications that we’d made, user accounts, etc. Essentially, the entire website was gone.

To rectify this, we would need to have a backup of our data. Generally, I tend to keep a fairly good amount of backups to reference and restore. This most recent restoration point that we used for this instance was from the end of July, about 3 months ago. It isn’t super awful, all things considered, but I was just a couple days away from creating a new backup to save all of the modifications and updates that I’d been applying to the website over the last month. Regardless, because our restore point was from the end of July, 3 months worth of customer data and site data was lost entirely.

What does this mean for customers?

In the grand scheme, not a whole lot. Recent order data was lost from the last 3 months which means you’ll need to refer to your emails for any license keys you received. If you need us to retrieve them for you, you’ll need the exact product name that you’re looking for the license key for us to have a chance of being able to provide the key for you.

If you signed up with us after July 24th, you’ll need to create your account again because it no longer exists.

Outside of those two core points, there isn’t a whole lot that would effect users outside of potentially finding bugs, or maybe a product or two that don’t have an image. We’re still working through and monitoring a lot of what’s going on with the website, and we’ve restored most functionality now. However, it is possible that some minor issues are still floating around.

Post Mortem

We’re still actively monitoring the site very heavily. We’re implementing plenty of updates, including the changed layout that you’re looking at right now.

If you experience an issue, or notice some sort of bug, we would greatly appreciate contacting us and letting us know so that may fix it. We will award anyone $20 for each issue noticed. A missing image doesn’t count or dead link doesn’t count, sorry!

We apologize for being down for so long. Unfortunately we had to wait several days for our hosting provider to just get us back online so that we could even begin most of the restoration process.

Apologies for any inconvenience.
– Elijah

Patched Errors

Below is a list of issues that have been fixed since coming back online:

• Page navigation fixed for product tags and categories
• Instant delivery fixed (Again, second time 10/26)
• Testimonials page fixed
• Checkout load speeds improved
• All users given 75,000 user reward points

See any issues? Please be sure to report them to claim your eWallet funds!