D’oh - Website downtime

You may have noticed that the PEWC website has been down for a number of weeks. We're back in business now and everything is back to normal. For those interested here's what happened…

Ponders End Wargaming Club has had a website for a very long time. Our original website was hosted on (the now defunct) Portent. Portent did a good job of hosting our website but we decided we wanted direct control of the hosting and our own domain. 

So, we registered the pewc.co.uk domain name with a company called Domainbusters and took up their hosting services too. Domainbusters hosting services were cheap but very basic. We could only run the most basic (and insecure) of forums and the forums were eventually hacked by evil Russian spammers. 

After the attack we thought it would be a good idea to move our website to a different hosting company. We chose Web-Mania because they offered a lot of webspace and all of the nerdy stuff that we needed to run a decent forum (mySQL, PHP, etc.). However, we didn't transfer over domain name. pewc.co.uk was still registered with Domainbusters.

This hosting transfer happened four years ago. Domain names are usually renewed every two years. Two years ago, Domainbusters kindly sent us a reminder and we renewed the domain name.

This year we received no reminder. Ironically, Domainbusters had gone bust. The domain name was with them and organisation in charge of all UK domain names wanted £90 + VAT to recover it. Damn. 

To cut a long story slightly shorter, we eventually managed to recover the domain and transfer it to another company. It was a lot of hassle and took a long time but we managed to renew the domain name for £6 instead of £90. Bargain.

Hopefully this won't happen again. Our domain name is now registered with a company that's been in the business for a long time and so they shouldn't go out of business with any luck.

Thanks for your patience!