Where did my favourite website go?

Well, I'll tell you where! HBH went into hiding for a couple of days, unexpectedly… but only to emerege twice as strong! Thats right members, breathe it in…. you can almost taste the dedicated server goodness! Specs are lovely, and its just for HBH.

Not only that but we have hordes of challenges we're releasing very soon. Once system_meltdown has tweaked them they'll be uploaded straight away!

Click Read more for an essay long news post and to find out how many challenges we have!!

Well, I'll tell you where! HBH went into hiding for a couple of days, unexpectedly… but only to emerege twice as strong! Thats right members, breathe it in…. you can almost taste the dedicated server goodness! Specs are lovely, and its just for HBH.

SANTA (a member on this site) is very kindly also donating a whole server for HBH. This is excellent as it means we have a constant backup incase of server issues and we also have a very nice plan for this server thats really going to be something special!!

Also…. We have new challenges being uploaded. JS / Basic / Realistic / Logical / Stegano… We got a whole bundle!!

For about 8 months now, HBH has always had the occasional customers from the hosting company going "oh no, the server load has increased 1%", "my site now loads 0.05 seconds slower, now my 5 visitors a day cant see my family photo's quickly"… etc….

Now the number of page views a second, mysql queries per page and rss parsers around the website, HBH needs a dedicated server to survive. So now we have it! Specs are wounderful and we have our own virtual data pipe so no other customer can complain about bandwidth issues! Breathe it in…… aaaahhhhhhhhhh Just look at the speed HBH loads! This is deffo going to be an improvement and sort page loading times!! I think im in love with this server :-D Maybe I should marry it…. hmm.. that or a div box.. havnt made up my mind yet, love them both the same. anyway……

You may have noticed a few days ago HBH was running slow, this is a combination of things.

1. As mentioned above, HBH is too powerful for shared hosting.
2. DDoS attacks on the server.

Put the two together and you make a server very unhappy.

I imagine you arent as excited as me about having a dedicated server, but its really going to work wounders for HBH and really push it forwards! We can now build virtually any feature we want, and re-install old ones we removed due to resources. So now HBH can really get to grips coding some of its advanced features we delayed due to hosting constraints!!! No more customer complaints, no more moving servers, no more easy cross-server hacks, no more hosting cancelling the account because of a misunderstanding of the domain name.

So!! Round house kick that in the face, Chuck Noris!!! We got our own dedicated server!!! Plesk…. the ultimate virtual kick in the nuts… if you can advoid using it, then do.. horrible package. Never configured a server before so its a big learning step for me (thanks for plesk being a pile of shite, im doing everything via ssh), hence why it took longer than we thought. Going from a cpanel environment, to a plesk fendora core environment is a bit tricky to setup folders and change defaults to get it to work with the backup.

Moving on……

Challenges!!

Estimated around 20 challenges! Got a big bundle of back logged challenges and a whole load were very kindly donated to us from another similar site that wont be needing them anymore. They have chosen to remain anonymous at this time, so lets give a big thank you to those who donated the challenges. We apprecaite the time they took coding the challenges and its truely a great shame they wont be using them on their own website.

Along with this dedicated server, as many companies are doing now, theres a promotion where if you sign up, you get a free domain and google adsense vouchers.

So the domain i picked was: www.howhackersgetin.co.uk and google adsense will be an excellent way to drive relavent traffic to our community. So feel free to use the domain howhackersgetin.co.uk to access the site. Certainly alot more socially acceptable than hellboundhackers.org.

Hope everyone had a great weekend whilst HBH was down.

We look forward to a stable, productive and successful future with this server. Which…. has yet to be named. Obvioulsy the server has to be a girls name, so whats a female server kinda name?

Please report any errors etc to me so I can work on it. As said above its a big learning curve for me, so please be patient. I'm going around fixing any errors I find due to server, but I may miss some.

Have a great week everyone!

Mr_Cheese