Only a Month?

As you can see, my site data was procured from evil Master Choco and we are finally back up in action. I was expecting to see that my last post was written before Christmastime or shortly there after, but to my complete surprise, ‘Don’t Cry Over Expired Milk’ was written on January 16th! This epic, month-long battle with our hosting company has proved interesting, and now I am finally ready to share our story with the world. Unfortunately, I am not yet at liberty to release the name of the company that has caused us so much strife, but read on for a detailed account of our 30 day struggle to regain our intellectual property.

After we were hacked on New Year’s Day we found out from our hosting company that they were moving their servers to another location. As a result of the move they wanted to know if we would be willing to migrate all of the information from our 2 hacked servers to 2 new servers at their new, undisclosed location in Florida. Knowing that he was going to have to rebuild the servers to fix any exploits or compromised information as a result of the New Year’s Hackfest, Butterfinger jumped at this opportunity, knowing it would motivate him to keep up the progress with the startup. Master Choco, our main connection at the hosting company, conveniently only available via email or instant message, told us we had until the end of January to move all of our data.

Fast forward 3 days to January 6th – our connection with our old servers has been turned off. We are at this point thinking there must be some type of misunderstanding or network issue, no big deal. When we establish contact with Master Choco he reluctantly lets us know that politics have somehow gotten involved in the server relocation, and the people who have taken over their old servers in their old location have turned off the access. We are told to rest assured that they will get to the bottom of this, make sure our data is safe, and that they are in no way at fault for what is going on.

This back and forth continued for the next three weeks via instant message and email (although half of the emails he claims to have sent were never received by Butterfinger). Quickly the tables turned in the situation and we were at fault for not making sure our migration was done in a timely manner, meaning we took too long to make backups and transfer everything from one server to another. At no point was it EVER the server company’s fault, nor would Master Choco take any blame for any of the events that transpired.

The following is an excerpt from an email:

We are having some issues right now with the data center not wanting to “reinstate” our license. Our staff members are doing their best right now to get everything back in order. Please understand that <Master Choco’s Evil World of Servers> is NOT at fault for this and this situation came as a shock to us. We always keep our clients updated with any network plans, sadly this was not one of them. Both of your new servers are up. We will and can work out compensation for this. We are still trying to meet the needs of the data center and directly speaking with the owner. We will gladly keep you posted. In the mean time I would recommend preparing your new servers. If you need any assistance, please let us know.

Not only do they not take the blame for what happened, they are pretty much telling us to get over it and prepare our new servers. Well… preparing the new servers is a pretty daunting task when you do not have any of the info from the other servers!! Ok, yes, we did have backups, but not of everything. For example, we had a backup saved of my blog but it did not contain any of the posts after leaving on our trip, and we had no backups at all of any of the data we collected from our users about the ads that had run on our site – pretty important stuff when you are trying to make money from ads on your site.

As for compensation, before this whole mess happened they had already double charged us for the month of December so that payment was supposed to be applied to January. Well, not surprisingly, they automatically deducted their January fees from our account, so we have now paid for the months of January and February and will have only had our sites up for half of the time. I could probably get over the fact that we paid for two months of a service that was not working for us, I mean, I already pay $50 a month for cell phone service that does not work everywhere, but when they tried to get more money from us I absolutely lost it.

Around the time of Butterfinger’s birthday, Master Choco let us know that he had “excellent” news for us, that they would be able to get us access to our servers. For the low, low price of $800 PER SERVER we would be able to have access and obtain what is rightfully ours. Master Choco’s company was willing to pay half of those fees and we would have to pay them directly so they could work everything out with the evil server overloads that have taken over their old place of business. Right. I did not just get off of the boat yesterday and have heard of extortion once or twice; it was at this point we became entirely committed to the cause of getting our data back no matter what.

We were ready to drive down to Florida ourselves and rip the hardware out of the machines if we had to. We could drive the van into the wall to break it, split up and find which box had our stuff, and make a quick getaway before anyone even heard the sound of the building’s exterior structure being compromised. If Master Choco would not give us the contact info for the hell spawn that now held our precious info we would drive down there and get it for ourselves, using whatever means necessary. Butterfinger did not get expelled from school for making a tazer out of a camera for nothing – we would put these skills to good use!

Ok, as you can see, we started to get a little crazy with the whole thing for awhile. We eventually calmed down and decided to wait it out, keeping daily contact with them regarding the status and showing them that we were not willing to just forget about our data. Eventually we resorted to threatening to sue them, at which point things started to perk up and the possibility of getting our servers back before the end of the world actually became a reality. This is the email we received after mentioning possible legal action:

We know this %100 (the fact that we had been waiting about 3 light years to get our data back). However, I also explained to you the situation where they are being “hostile” towards us, not wanting to make this process easy so to speak. If you can, contact me tomorrow on MSN. I apologize for the delays in updates, I have been out sick for the past couple days, <Master Choco’s Crony> usually updates me and then I would relay the information to you, unfortunately I haven’t been at my desk much to check for any updates. Please contact me on MSN tomorrow if possible, as I said we are still awaiting a reply, we have agreed to the funds they have requested to release the servers and awaiting their reply.

I am still not sure if I believe that there were ever funds exchanged the between the two companies, instead I prefer the conspiracy theory that they were behind the whole thing and actually had some poor saps end up paying them $800 per server to get back their info. Then they most likely had even more people fall for their lie when they eventually offered to pay half of the $800 fee, and then finally caved in to the rest of us that were not having any of their games. It all is just way too much of a coincidence to me, and seeing how I do not believe in coincidence, it has to be a conspiracy!

Yesterday, Saint Valentine’s Day of all days, we received an email from Master Choco saying that we would have access to our old servers for a 12 hour period starting from NOW (the time when the email was written). Come on, we wait for 30 days, listen to all of your bs, let you blame us for not moving quick enough on the migration, play along while you try to trick us out of $800, and without any prior warning you send out an email to let us know that we have a McGuyver-like time frame in which to complete the file transfers? Thank you so much Master Choco! Could you please also give us the lowest bandwidth technologically possible to do the transfers? Wish granted.

Butterfinger spent all night, minus the hour or so it took us to locate all of the passwords we changed after the hack happened, moving everything over and making sure the job was done properly. At 5:00 PST Startup Fiance came back online much to the delight of all of you:) So be sure to leave nice comments for Butterfinger because he is the one who stuck it out through this whole thing and made sure that Master Choco did not destroy the web empire we have been working so hard to create, I am just here to document everything:) So welcome back everyone and be sure to come back every single day for new content!!

I am also going to start posting pics in every post (and go back and ad some to previous posts), due to popular request:) Here is the mobile office in our 1999 VW Eurovan (click picture to enlarge):