Feral Hosting is also gone, site has been taken offline!
tl;dr www.feralhosting.com is down, database lost, slots are up and will remain up. We're moving to the honour system for paying bills.
We have a new IRC channel hosted at chat.freenode.net ##feral (note: this is not #feral) Join the lively discussion!
Feral Hosting is a managed hosting provider. All hardware is owned by us and hosted securely in the Netherlands with our colocation providers. Our network is also run and owned solely by us and has links that spread across Europe. The exception to this set up was our front-end server www.feralhosting.com which was hosted by OVH—one of Europe's largest dedicated server providers. This was done to use their anti distributed denial of service (DDoS) facilities and is our only server with OVH.
On Wednesday 16th 2016 at 09:16 UTC our front-end server was taken down by OVH. After contacting support they said it was an action instigated by their legal department. They have not been given any further information and the legal department have not contacted me directly.
Promptly I began the process of restoring from a back up and moving to another server,li something that has been completed many times before. During this restoration process back ups for our site database were accidentally deleted. At this point the database is presumed to be lost.
Our Thoughts and Feelings
Feral is a small business and there are two people who draw full-time wages from the business. Our livelihoods depend on this business that has been built from the ground up over the past seven years. Our intention is very much to carry on moving forward and will do everything in our power to do so.
Current Status
Quick-fire question and answers:
Do I still have access to my slot?
Yes—our slots are hosted on our own network and hardware.
Will I continue to have access to my slot?
Yes—we will not take your slot down. We have no reason to and will keep things going for as long as possible.
My slot was suspended just before the front-end was taken down, can I do anything about it?
Yes—please e-mail us your username and server and we will unsuspend the slot manually.
How long will I have access to my slot?
We are looking to keep access open to your slot indefinitely. We will need you to claim the slot so watch this space for more information next week.
I don't have access to my slot, can you help?
We must honour customer privacy which means guaranteeing that only you have access to your private data. As such, we are unable to provide you with passwords to services right now. This is something we're working on.
Why wasn't the front-end server hosted on your own network?
Excellent question, one I ask myself. We used OVH for their anti distributed denial of service facilities. We now rely on Cloudflare in a manner that doesn't allow them to take down the main server.
What information does the front-end server store?
It stores meta information about your slot. For example, the start and end dates of your slot, username, and anything that was displayed when you were logged in. The only private information we stored was the e-mail address.
Has the front-end been compromised?
No, I do not believe so. OVH have little to gain by compromising our server. Our server appears to be going through their "server has not been renewed" lifecycle.
Can this bankrupt Feral?
No—we hold no debt and have enough cash to survive for more than a year (this normally goes towards buying very expensive hardware).
What shall I do right now?
Please continue enjoying your slot as normal.
Forward Feral
Looking towards the future I have a two-prong plan:
We move all slots to an honour system of payment. Users will be able to provide a username and server (identifying a slot) that they would like to renew then they can make a payment for as much (or as little) as they want.
Everything gets built from the ground up: bigger and better than before (without losting slots).
Next Steps
We will work behind the scenes building a new payment system as soon as possible. We will update this page and send out e-mails to recent payments made via Stripe and GoCardless when things are ready to move forward.
I would like to emphasise that Feral is staying put and will continue to provide a service for the foreseeable future.
