Update3: The site should be open and accessible now. We had to make a lot of changes to get the old system back in place and working. We’ve also made a lot of structural changes and the system should be more responsive and robust now. Tested the hosts and everything is online except MU. It’ll be back online in a couple hours. The promised extensions will be going out in a couple hours too. Me and Dman just need to get some sleep and then we’ll extend every user with the promised compensation time. Plus a few additional days for the delayed relaunch. Please remember to open a ticket at the helpdesk for any problem you encounter. The previous tickets relating to the new system will be closed since the new system is no longer being used. The beta will be announced in a few days. And the mass email will be going out once I wake up

If your account recently expired, please do not renew. You will be extended as compensation so don’t shell out any cash just yet

A huge thanks to everyone who held on and trusted us with their time and money. We promise to make it up to everyone for the downtimes and the problems in the past week. And we wish and hope that we never have to go through something of this sort ever again!

Update2: About an hour or so to go. Bringing back the old system and re-arranging users/plans, etc. Hold on please!

Update: Looks like my eta of 24-48 hours was the latter. 48 hours. A couple more hours to. We’ve got the 2 new servers and configured them. But we’re waiting on a hardware resolution for one of them. An email will be sent out once we’re backup

You’re probably not surprised by the ‘lockdown’ this time round. And you’re also probably frustrated by it. But we’ve temporarily disabled the site, again, to avoid further frustration. Read on for an explanation and how we’re resolving it.

I do realize that the new system brought with a lot of problems. Bugs kept creeping up and we did fix a lot of them. MU links would return 500 errors and/or the file not found error over and over and we fixed that. There was NL which kept generating 11 byte files half the time. We fixed that, but we did not fix it. I know that sounds confusing. We fixed it and everytime we tried it worked. But for some users it just would not work half the time. HF decided to ban our accounts and we had to temporarily disable it. As if that was not enough, MU followed suit today. And Rapidshare bans the P1 server on and off randomly.

Things had been great before the new system. But the new system is not entirely to blame. If anything, it’s ingenious in a lot of ways. The problems started coming up before the new system was put into effect but they were not so obvious.

Why the lockdown and what’s changing? Well the lockdown is necessary for the changes that are coming up. I can’t really give you guys a staunch ETA of that, but I’ll say anywhere between 24-48 hours.

We’ve currently got 2 file servers that stream the downloads. One of them is an extra powerful server that we use to serve a fair few users. Unfortunately, it comes at a price. The fact that it is extra powerful means more users can use it simultaneously. That’s great. But, it also strains the end filehost more. What does that do? It leads to that specific filehost blocking the server. That’s what happens when Rapidshare stops working for some of you guys (who’re on P1). That’s why Fileserve links sometime fail to generate. And I’m assuming that’s why MU keeps banning our accounts. And most probably, that’s the reason HF banned our accounts too.

We’ve decided to split that server up into two. Divide the load and spread the requests over more server. We had 2 servers, but they’ll be 4 now. The larger one will be divided into two. The second one will stay. And a new server will be added. That’s 4gbps of downloading capacity as opposed to 2gbps. We’re waiting on server deployment and we expect that to be in the next couple hours. Once we have it, we’ll set them up and bring the service back online.

But wait. There’s more changes coming up.

We’ll switch to the old code/system when the new servers are online. Dman says it’s stable. Although you guys will lose fileserve’s resume functionality, you’ll get back HF and MU as stable filehosts to download from. Although, again, we can’t exactly predict if we’ll be good to go this time round. Chances are, HF/MU may still end up banning us. But that’s not something to worry about. What’s more important is getting everything back online.

What about the new system/code then? Well that’s a little exciting. We’ll put the new system up on a different subdomain and it’ll be turned into a closed BETA. About 20-30 random premium subscribers will be invited to join the beta and help us test and iron out all the bugs. Once we’re sure the BETA works well up to our standards, we’ll release it to the public and replace the old system again. This time, if all goes well, it’ll be bug free and ready to use without any problem(s).

And last, but not the least, owing to the recent troubles over the past 3 days now. And continuing to the next day or two, I’ll be extending every account in the system by an additional 2 weeks once we’re back online on the new infrastructure. I’d like to sincerely apologize for all the inconvenience caused to you during this lockdown. But I assure you that you’ll be appropriately compensated for your money’s worth and that it’s being done to end up with a more stable system. Unlike most of the other premium link generators, we do place our premium subscribers first. And I guess we’ve managed to prove that in the past and continue to do that. I highly doubt any other similar service out there is as transparent with its users as we are.

And once again, my sincere apologies for the inconvenience caused to you during this lockdown.

Regards,
Hamza Y

So after a whole day’s worth of work, bug testing, bug killing, filehost link testing, stress testing, download testing, and resume testing.. well.. we’re finally stable. At least, that’s what I can say. I’ve test the hosts over a dozen times now over all the servers we operate and everything is checking out.

I did have a few tickets complaining of failed generations and/or downloads but when I checked those, it was checking out fine. I’ve also had a user who wasn’t happy about the downtime. That’s one user who expressed how he felt about it. I’m still not sure how many users actually feel that our dedication and service is not up to the mark. If you’re one of those, please let us know. This will help us in amending anything wrong that we’ve been doing with the way we handle situations here at RPNet.

There’s a couple announcements to make, so I’ll be quick with them so I can get back to fixing stuff up on the UserCP news and the rest.

- Fileserve is finally fixed. Link generation may occasionally fail. If it does, try it again. We’re going to perfect it over the next day or two. The downloads now do not expire. They pause and resume just fine. So you can generate, say, 10 links and leave them to download over night. Previously, the download links expired amazingly quick. We’ve implemented the workaround to this so all should be going good now.

- There’s a 20gb/day download limit for Megaupload. This is NOT PERMANENT. This is just a simple experimental phase. Please do not be surprised.

- One (or possibly more than one, but not a majority) of our users’ have been abusing Hotfile downloads a lot. I’ve asked Dman to check on that as soon as he gets in. So if some of you come across constantly failing link generation, it’s probably because our Hotfile account(s) were suspended thanks to that abuse. Please be patient in this regard as this will be sorted out as soon as Dman gets in. That should be a few hours from now.

- We’ve finally perfected and implemented zShare. So yeah, that’s a new host we’ve added. It’s one of the hosts we’ve planned to add for sometime now but we could not thanks to persistent issues that kept cropping up. Test drive your zShare downloads all you want

- We will not be able to add FileSonic. The reason is still the same. Bandwidth limits with no ability to purchase more bandwidth. The only way is to buy more accounts. And that’s just not feasible. I’m sorry about this, but there’s not much I can do.

- Every account in the system was credited with a 3 day bonus extension owing to the downtime for the past 24 hours.

I’m still awake for a couple hours. So I’ll be handling your tickets in case you come across troubles with your download(s).

And last, but not the least – a huge round of applause to Insolsence for his work on RPNet. He coded the new link generation system in an amazing timeframe and the way he has handled everything was completely professional. We realize that the new system had some serious bugs, but they were fixed within a reasonable time and everyone was compensated for the loss.

Before I conclude this post, I’d like to apologize to everyone at large for the 24 hours of messed up downloading experience. That was clearly not our intention. And we’ve worked all day today to fix every bug we’ve managed to find. The end result has been a more stable link generation/download system, the fileserve fix, and a new filehost (zShare). And of course, 3 days of extension that we owe to everyone.

Please remember to use the helpdesk for support queries. Posting your support related issues on this post will only cause unwanted delays in assisting you in a proper manner.

Cheers,
Hamza Y