Welcome back everybody.
For those of you who regularly visit the site, you may have noticed we were having some “minor” technical issues over the weekend.
Well I am happy to say, despite the rumors we are still here and not going anywhere and everything is back online.
For long term followers and those that are interested, coolsmartphone has been around for well over 20 years. The site has had many iterations over those years, and many things have been bolted on, bodged in and added over that time. As some of you know this was all the work of coolsmartphone founder Leigh, he solely built and managed coolsmartphone himself over the years, until he sadly passed away in 2021.
I took on this behemoth of site, with no map or instructions on how Leigh had put it all together. So over the past couple of years, I’ve just sort of maintained the status quo and kept it ticking over, while silently cursing Leigh for some of his bodges and hacks 😉
Unfortunately Saturday morning at around 5am UK time, things took a turn for the worse and the main coolsmartphone server located somewhere in a Datacentre in Germany, sent me an email and breathed its last breath.
This server doesn’t just dish out what you are seeing here, it contains years worth of coolsmartphone history. Call me sentimental, but i didn’t just want to wipe and start again, so I tried my hardest to resurrect what was already there.
Unfortunately this was not going to work out, so I had to transfer everything I could salvage off the failed server to my home storage and servers.
But what about backups you scream, yes I had a full backup from the previous week (of the site and all essential components) but as I have previously mentioned, this site has a few sticking plasters holding it together and its age and sheer amount of content, just restoring the backup was not a simple as it should have been, not to mention the way the OS had been configured. P.S. this site is too big and complicated for most $1 a month hosting platforms, so it runs on physical tin in a proper datacentre.
The time had come, I had to bite the bullet and rebuild the server from scratch, transfer 100’s of Gigabytes data around, and this time put it all back together in a proper fashion that I would be able to manage better going forward.
Anyway to bring a long winded story to an end, as I need some sleep. Everything is back online, however some things may still be a little janky, so bear with me.
Now that I have complete control and I know whats what, I plan to make some positive changes to the design and site in general going forward, with the help of Garry and Ian who have continued to bring you the content you come here for.
Oh did you notice, we have fewer AD’s, one step closer to AD free !!
(I may post about that another time, but it is something I have been wanting to do for ages and now I can!).
Thanks for bearing with me!
Ant