Hello everyone,

Haven’t posted on this blog in a while. And I would not be typing this post, either. But it’s out of necessity, much less an announcement that would generally be exciting.

Most of you, if not all, have noticed the troubles we’ve been having with Hotfile in the past couple days. Randomly failing link generations and such. Initially, it was Hotfile not sending back the correct response to our server which would result in a dead link. Or at least, that is what we thought. We decided to dig deeper earlier yesterday and we found out that Hotfile would consistently ban/block our server(s) randomly.

We have been using the database server to generate Hotfile links and the download servers then download those links. Hotfile, being a popular service/site, gets used a lot on RPNet. With the number of users on RPNet increasing by the day, it’s only obvious that there would be more Hotfile links being generated all day long. This causes a flood of requests and Hotfile bans our server (although only temporarily) time and again.

We fixed this issue yesterday by making the download servers generate the links instead of the database. That would route requests on 2 servers, instead of 1. That would mean the load on Hotfile would be distributed between 2 servers, not 1 and we would have lesser chances of getting banned.

That theory was fine and it worked, for about 12-18 hours. Today, one of our clients reported issues with downloading Hotfile, and on looking into the issue we found out that Hotfile had banned/blocked both our download servers. There’s obviously not as much load on Hotfile from one server, but we figure there’s enough on both servers individually to trigger a Hotfile ban.

We don’t know the threshold. We don’t know at what ‘point’ Hotfile bans the server temporarily due to an overload of requests. We don’t know what Hotfile considers an ‘overload’. So our only option, at this point, is to somehow test, trial, error and then find out the limit.

We’re doing exactly that at this moment. We’ve limited Hotfile links to 20 per user for all users. We’ll gradually increase that and see at what point we get banned by Hotfile for a connection flood.

Dman has also suggested (in fact, he’s trying to persuade me) that we drop support for Hotfile completely. Over the past couple months we’ve spent a lot of time and resources on maintaining Hotfile. Time and resources that we could have otherwise spent on better developing RPNet and a lot of features that we have been missing out on and putting a hold on. Hotfile has seriously been a real pain for us over the past couple months. They’re one of the most notorious filehost out there.

Fortunately, they have not permanently banned us just yet, so we’re not forced to drop it. However, if we DO get banned (permanently) by Hotfile in the future, we will NOT be able to support it again as it’s neither feasible nor practical to switch servers (and datacenters) because of a Hotfile ban.

Basically, if you see issues and kinks with Hotfile in the coming couple days, please don’t be surprised. We’re going to try and fix this issue somehow, although there is no guarantee of anything at this moment regarding Hotfile. Blame Hotfile for this. We would love to play fair, but Hotfile does not want to.

I’m not sure if this blog post will end up being lengthy or short. But, let’s see how it goes.

So our PayPal account access has just been restored. It’s been 2 hours or so, and we’ve been rushing back and forth getting a lot of things sorted out in general with RPNet.

The entire issue was failure to verify Dman’s date of birth. And we had to call them over and over just to eventually find that out. Once we were told that was the issue, it was a simple case of scanning 2 extra documents (both had his date of birth) and sending it to them and they restored access.

So, at the end of the day, PayPal delayed us for days – for a birth date verification! I can’t really rant a lot right now, because we’ve got a lot of work to finish.

But, now that we have our account access restored, we’re back in business. We’re accepting payments again. AND, we’ve also got plans this time round. If PayPal decides to limit our account again, we won’t be hit this hard, ever again.

That brings me to our current plans. Over the course of the next couple days, we’re going to do the following:

- Get another server, on another network. This will be done to improve redundancy and overall geo location based speeds. So if a user experiences slowdowns on one server, we can move him to another that’s on a different network (and most probably) one that has better routing to his connection. Both networks we’ll be putting our servers on, are one of the best in the industry. We don’t ever compromise on quality. Our servers are generally under utilized with LOTS of spare capacity to account for usage peaks.

- Put everything in order. We’ve lost a lot of sales/business because of the Paypal mess up. And we’re going to be updating all the places/forums we post to, that we’ve resumed accepting payments.

- We also have a modification in development. Let’s just call it the HDD addon. The HDD addon will allow the end user to choose whether to stream the file directly to his desktop, or to have it saved on our server’s HDD first (thus the name, HDD addon) and then download using a direct link that does not expire. Both have their advantages, of course. But, for a few problematic filehosts, the HDD addon could be a real blessing. More updates on this as we get it done

- The long delayed poll for new filehost additions. I’ll put that poll up tonight, for sure. And a mass email will be sent out so you guys can vote and decide on the new hosts that we should add.

I guess that’s about it for now If there’s anything else, I’ll put up a blog post. If you guys think I’ve missed something out, please let me know in the comments and I’ll cover it!

~Hamza