Our service has been down for 24 hours (Friday-Saturday late afternoon, 2012-04-27,28).
It was not only TorVPN, ShellTOR, Tor.hu and others that were cut off the internet: hundreds of
servers hosted at Hostoffice have been affected.
Apparently Hostoffice and T-Online
had a dispute that did not involve us in any way. As a result of that dispute, T-Online cut off
uplink to Hostoffice without warning and then the data center (Dataplex)
refused physical access to the server owners effectively making it impossible for them to find a
resolution to this situation.
The cut-off was no doubt timed before the weekend
and the holiday on purpose, effectively killing Hostoffice,
the server hosting company we have been using for over 6 years to host our servers with reliability, at least up to this point.
For unknown reasons, T-Online changed their minds just now and returned service to Hostoffice, therefore
we are all able to reach the servers again. Regardless of the long term
outcome of what just happened, we have made it our priority number one to improve redundancy throughout the
upcoming months.
TorVPN, ShellTOR and Hax.TOR have 4 servers with encrypted HDDs and cross-backups. If any of them were to fail it would have been handled smoothly. Our server hosting provider in the most prestigious data center of the country with the most links, security features and redundancy did not seem like the weakest link in the chain. Neither was it possible to duplicate a system of thousands of dollars worth of servers at a stage where the business just managed to break even.
All TorVPN accounts with a valid paid service had their
service extended by one month without request.
All ShellTOR customers received their monthly cost in credits for the inconvenience.
We understand this couldn't possibly make up for all the frustration, and please be
assured that a long term solution is already being worked on.
During the next days, weeks and months you will see new announcements or at least
short posts regarding the steps we take to increase the stability of our
DNS, e-mail, web and VPN services.
Your understanding is most appreciated.