I agree that it's taken much too long, but
BCG really is returning very soon, I've been testing the website, forum,
irc and
tracker over the last week which are online for staff testing only
atm. There are a few technical problems left to resolve before we can relaunch, but it honestly shouldn't be long now. We have now moved to a much faster server with a much faster connection and most importantly we now have advanced DDoS protection.
Technology has moved on since the original hosting agreement was made with our old host. Unfortunately they didn't upgrade our service to keep up with the times and our privately owned server was due for replacement anyway when it died all of a sudden at the worse time (the new server is rented and is therefore covered for any hardware repairs). In fact we was planning to upgrade our server soon anyway, but obviously if it had all been planned properly in advance everything would have been in place which would have only meant around 2-3 days of scheduled downtime with plenty of notice for our members.
You can get a lot more for your money now than what we was being charged for by our old host so even though the new server and service is much better it's still financially sustainable as long as we recover and start receiving average levels of donations again within a reasonable amount of time after we relaunch..
We still wouldn't have been able to afford everything including the upfront setup costs for the new server without kind donations including some that were made even after we went offline. We are therefore extremely grateful as without these loyal members our future survival would have been unlikely no matter how much Stoi and the staff wanted to continue. A big thank you!