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I wondered, was concerned; now I know. Glad you have a handle on it, AW. Thanks!

Original Post: ArtWanted.com Down Time

Valued ArtWanted.com Members –

As many of you may have noticed, our website has been unavailable for a couple of days. We deeply apologize to everyone that was affected by this down time. Below you will find the details of what happened if you would like to know...

This all started a few weeks ago when we started seeing random hardware errors on one of our critical servers, which caused the website to go down for a few minutes at a time. Our engineers have been investigating the cause of these problems, when everything came to a halt on Thursday. One of the hard drives failed and the other drives on the server were corrupted, which made the server worthless and the website went offline. This is a very rare situation to happen to a server, but it is possible.

With this server out-of-commission, we needed to get a brand-new server built and setup to replace the old server. The process of building this new server from scratch and restoring our backups took several days, but things are now up and running. We are using a temporary server right now, which may make the site slower than normal, but this is only until we get our more power powerful server working early next week. We will have some scheduled maintenance next week to upgrade our servers, but we will plan to do this in the late evening.

And now the good news…

• All of the ArtWanted.com data is safe, secure and backed-up.
• No data was lost from this hard drive failure, because of our back-ups.
• The new server should also fix the brief random down time you may have seen over the last few weeks.
• Computers are unpredictable, but this situation has caused our staff to re-double our efforts on disaster mitigation, data back-ups and look for ways to be prepared for the worst.

We want to remind everyone again that the security of your data and images is very important to us and taken very seriously. We use the highest standards of data encryption on all sensitive data and maintain backups of our data for cases of emergency (like this one). You can feel good knowing your important data is safe and secure with ArtWanted.com.

Again we apologize for the last few days of down time and we welcome you back to the site. Hopefully you were busy painting and drawing and never even noticed that the site was down. Please report any errors or strange problems to our staff immediately. Thank You!

Sincerely,

The Staff of ArtWanted.com