Our community server got destroyed @ g-portal

[Anuko]

Funcom, if you wish, i send you the complete dialog with the "customer support".
In short words: I have never experienced such a impertinent behavior.

First thing: Over a hour waitung for a answer
(server crashed and shut down, restarts failed. The server was full, 50 players - with the usual laggy performance on a vserver).

Next thing: After 90min, the server comes back - with a wiped database. Tried to restore the savefile, next time the server did not even show up.

No sorry, no further help, no compensation was offered. The reason was a "third party software" that killed the server. I will not even take a further look into the tickets, i have enough from this company.

80+ people lost their progress from 2 weeks, our Community is f.... up.

The last answer in german:

Finest (Michael S.) Kundensupport
17.02.2017 - 00:17

Hallo,
ich habe nochmals geschaut. Es ist im FTP nichts vorhanden. Sprich es sollten normal game.db
und game_backup_1 bis 63.db da sein. Es war wie ich mir ihr Ticket angeschaut habe und den
prozess beendet habe, keine datei mehr da.

Ich kann somit nicjts wiederherstellen. Wir hatten so einen fall vor ca 3 Tagen bei einem 70 Slot server
und nichts gefunden was diesendatein hätte löschen können. Dies wirde an funcom reported da wir offizieller hoster sind
und wor haben bisher nur als antwort erhalten das dieser fall untersucht wird

Mit freundlichen Grüßen / best regards
Finest (Michael S.)

Funcom, i truly wish to support you, but this case is hard stuff. I will rent a ded. server from another hoster and give it a second (realistic) try - but i hope this will have consequences. Insulting, childish supporters and long response times are not bearable, besides the tech chaos, daily crashes and performance problems on those 3.5GHz vservers.

[Littletinker]

sounds like you got hit hard. sory to hear what happened had hosts like that befor they can be a royal pain to deal with but dont let you think twice there plenty of nice and decent hosts out there. reading your ticket reply tho sounds like they pushing all on fc shoulders loss of data normaly a provider fault not a game fault.

[Anuko]

I should have known better, never rent a gaming server - get a ded. root and you're fine.
I thought there is enough experience since 2 years of Ark @ g-portal, but it doesn't seem so to me.
Cost me the whole night to get a decent root...

Does anyone want a 50 slot g-portal server for free? ~2 weeks remaining.... maybe its running again if someone fix it.

[David6768]

Of course you FTP'ed into your server and made backups in case you have to restore your database right.
Did you try to manually load in any of the auto generated game.db backups?
You have had an ark server for 2 years and you don't make independent backups. I don't even know what to say to that.

An hour waiting time on a support is a super great response time!

[Larry]

My server's admin, who made a purist PvP server, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ out and claimed someone "hacked" the server and deleted all backups then cancelled the server and killed it completely. Two weeks of our time just gone because of a lying prick who cheated full T3 into the game to build his carebear city on a PvP server. We Yoged it when we wasted 60+ explosives on his base only to realise everything was T3 when he was only level 43 playing solo.

He lied about being hacked. We got in touch with the service provider and they said there was no way they were hacked into and there was no way it was possible his account was compromised short of him giving someone else the password and login details.

Scumbags everywhere. The servers he used were okay though, held a decent 30-40 players with not many issues. Think he used GTX Gaming servers or something like that? When we asked them about what happened to our server they got back to us after a minute. They couldn't tell us everything, only the base stuff like "We weren't hacked, his account wasn't hacked short of him giving out his password and credentials" and that the server was cancelled by the person paying for it. They also made mention of how it's happened a lot in games like this where server hosts will rage quit and sabotage their own servers. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

[Anuko]

You misunderstood me, g-portal have a 2 year experience with Ark, i have "only" 2k hours as a Ark admin.
The answer from the supporter means, that the whole db gots destroyed, there are no restorable backups. Sure, i could download it all the time through ftp, nothing better to do.. - a backup solution is part of the offer and i have never experienced such a fail from a hoster or "third party software". It's done for me, not my task to fix this mess up, even if i could.

[=TFO= Killswitch]

try gameservers they have 24 hr help and ive had my server witht hem form the start . only hade to wip it oce cuse soem stopid trees sprung up in peoples bases

[silvyan415]

Wow I thought I had it bad... 2 weeks of game progress??? Thats ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up.

[silvyan415]

I'm starting to think that maybe the game code just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ -broke- after this ♥♥♥♥♥♥ patch. Literally nothing they claimed to have fixed or 'improved' should have caused this many devistating anomolies. I literally cannot play more than 5 minutes without crashing out. I've had to put the game down, it has, because of this patch, become unplayable. I'll have to wait it out... hope that they make a more stable client. In the meantime, I'm sorry you've lost your entire server and all that progress.

[David6768]

Originally posted by TheRightBrain:

You misunderstood me, g-portal have a 2 year experience with Ark, i have "only" 2k hours as a Ark admin.
The answer from the supporter means, that the whole db gots destroyed, there are no restorable backups. Sure, i could download it all the time through ftp, nothing better to do.. - a backup solution is part of the offer and i have never experienced such a fail from a hoster or "third party software". It's done for me, not my task to fix this mess up, even if i could.

It only takes 5 minutes to FTP in and make a daily backup. I am not suggesting you make offsite backups every hour but once a day takes 5 minutes and a 24 hour rollback is something that can be lived with vs a 2 week wipe. I do off site daily backups and have done it for all my servers.Without backups there is no way you can fix it, lesson learned I guess.

[TacTicToe]

Try NFOServers, youll be much happier if you do.

[Anuko]

Even if a had a backup - the server is still not running and it would be worth nothing - other IP, most of the users are gone = wipe on a fresh server.

2 weeks after start it's still a experimental adventure, but i'm not blaming the devs for it - i would rather blame them for missing admin commands like "givallstructures", "teleporttoplayer" adjustable building decay etc.

The funny part: Yesterday i told some guys, the chance of a wipe is very high at this early point through big game chances, but never expected a hoster (or his guilty software) capable of destroying a database with backups.

There are not many local hosters with a fair price or even decent/new hardware, only one small hoster remains (good experience with it in the past, ordered a 7700k at gamerzhost (bigger players like hetzner are way to expensive with a setup fee over 100€

The worst offer i have found so far: 4790k for 139,--, hire purchase for 18 months - basic offer without windows licence etc. - guess who is the hoster? g-portal... even if i would stick by them, upgrading to a decent root - there is no decent root without buying it and pay 3 times more than it's worth.

Funcom: Please go to hetzner, they should have the needed power, get away from vcores if you ever want official server with more than 50 players running smooth. Put the heavily read/written db file into a fast ram disk, should help a lot (just a idea).

g-portal had at least 2 times a hardware upgrade and stopped new private servers for becoming your official hoster. Seems they are a second pingperfect desaster.

[David6768]

Originally posted by TheRightBrain:

Even if a had a backup - the server is still not running and it would be worth nothing - other IP, most of the users are gone = wipe on a fresh server.

2 weeks after start it's still a experimental adventure, but i'm not blaming the devs for it - i would rather blame them for missing admin commands like "givallstructures", "teleporttoplayer" adjustable building decay etc.

The funny part: Yesterday i told some guys, the chance of a wipe is very high at this early point through big game chances, but never expected a hoster (or his guilty software) capable of destroying a database with backups.

There are not many local hosters with a fair price or even decent/new hardware, only one small hoster remains (good experience with it in the past, ordered a 7700k at gamerzhost (bigger players like hetzner are way to expensive with a setup fee over 100€

The worst offer i have found so far: 4790k for 139,--, hire purchase for 18 months - basic offer without windows licence etc. - guess who is the hoster? g-portal... even if i would stick by them, upgrading to a decent root - there is no decent root without buying it and pay 3 times more than it's worth.

Funcom: Please go to hetzner, they should have the needed power, get away from vcores if you ever want official server with more than 50 players running smooth. Put the heavily read/written db file into a fast ram disk, should help a lot (just a idea).

g-portal had at least 2 times a hardware upgrade and stopped new private servers for becoming your official hoster. Seems they are a second pingperfect desaster.

I just think you maybe you are inexperienced as a server host or are a bit in over your head. if you have a backup you redownload the server files and install the backup game save and it will be running. As long as you had a working save the reload will be working.
Something is kinda funny here though because even the game hosts normally make cloud backups at least daily so there should have been a backup restored not a full wipe.
If you search around for server's at data centers you can get way better deals than those offered by the "game hosting" companies. We are talking unmanaged servers though so what you get is a PC on a rack with DDOS protection and remote access, that's it, keeping windows updated, the game updated, making backups, and keeping everything running is up to you. I will tell you that $139/month is more than I am paying for an I7-6700K 32gigs ram 256gig SSD and a 2TB backup drive with 100GB of cloud backup that I use as a redundant backup to SSD, the SSD is backed up to the HD the HD to the cloud. It of course also has DDOS protection. If you think you want an unmanaged server let me know and I will pass you a couple good places to shop. If you want one and need help setting it up I can help you out with that as well.

[SilvaDreams]

Originally posted by david6768:

Originally posted by TheRightBrain:

Even if a had a backup - the server is still not running and it would be worth nothing - other IP, most of the users are gone = wipe on a fresh server.

2 weeks after start it's still a experimental adventure, but i'm not blaming the devs for it - i would rather blame them for missing admin commands like "givallstructures", "teleporttoplayer" adjustable building decay etc.

The funny part: Yesterday i told some guys, the chance of a wipe is very high at this early point through big game chances, but never expected a hoster (or his guilty software) capable of destroying a database with backups.

There are not many local hosters with a fair price or even decent/new hardware, only one small hoster remains (good experience with it in the past, ordered a 7700k at gamerzhost (bigger players like hetzner are way to expensive with a setup fee over 100€

The worst offer i have found so far: 4790k for 139,--, hire purchase for 18 months - basic offer without windows licence etc. - guess who is the hoster? g-portal... even if i would stick by them, upgrading to a decent root - there is no decent root without buying it and pay 3 times more than it's worth.

Funcom: Please go to hetzner, they should have the needed power, get away from vcores if you ever want official server with more than 50 players running smooth. Put the heavily read/written db file into a fast ram disk, should help a lot (just a idea).

g-portal had at least 2 times a hardware upgrade and stopped new private servers for becoming your official hoster. Seems they are a second pingperfect desaster.

I just think you maybe you are inexperienced as a server host or are a bit in over your head. if you have a backup you redownload the server files and install the backup game save and it will be running. As long as you had a working save the reload will be working.
Something is kinda funny here though because even the game hosts normally make cloud backups at least daily so there should have been a backup restored not a full wipe.
If you search around for server's at data centers you can get way better deals than those offered by the "game hosting" companies. We are talking unmanaged servers though so what you get is a PC on a rack with DDOS protection and remote access, that's it, keeping windows updated, the game updated, making backups, and keeping everything running is up to you. I will tell you that $139/month is more than I am paying for an I7-6700K 32gigs ram 256gig SSD and a 2TB backup drive with 100GB of cloud backup that I use as a redundant backup to SSD, the SSD is backed up to the HD the HD to the cloud. It of course also has DDOS protection. If you think you want an unmanaged server let me know and I will pass you a couple good places to shop. If you want one and need help setting it up I can help you out with that as well.

Sadly most people lack the knowledge to handle unmanaged servers and why they go for these horrid "Gaming server" hosts which use sub-par machines and stack as many people on one machine via virtual machines.
Worst I've seen was 12 to 14 servers stacked on one physical machine... Basically one server to one core and they were claiming 32Gb of ram, and a 3ghz processor and 1tb HDD for 20$ month.... I but in reality that is what the entire machine had.

[darkreaper_44]

Yeah my server im on recently went on dedi because these hosts like that you have to leech off memory and battle with other servers on who gets the lag lol.

[Datawarlock]

Originally posted by SilvaDreams:

Originally posted by david6768:

I just think you maybe you are inexperienced as a server host or are a bit in over your head. if you have a backup you redownload the server files and install the backup game save and it will be running. As long as you had a working save the reload will be working.
Something is kinda funny here though because even the game hosts normally make cloud backups at least daily so there should have been a backup restored not a full wipe.
If you search around for server's at data centers you can get way better deals than those offered by the "game hosting" companies. We are talking unmanaged servers though so what you get is a PC on a rack with DDOS protection and remote access, that's it, keeping windows updated, the game updated, making backups, and keeping everything running is up to you. I will tell you that $139/month is more than I am paying for an I7-6700K 32gigs ram 256gig SSD and a 2TB backup drive with 100GB of cloud backup that I use as a redundant backup to SSD, the SSD is backed up to the HD the HD to the cloud. It of course also has DDOS protection. If you think you want an unmanaged server let me know and I will pass you a couple good places to shop. If you want one and need help setting it up I can help you out with that as well.

Sadly most people lack the knowledge to handle unmanaged servers and why they go for these horrid "Gaming server" hosts which use sub-par machines and stack as many people on one machine via virtual machines.
Worst I've seen was 12 to 14 servers stacked on one physical machine... Basically one server to one core and they were claiming 32Gb of ram, and a 3ghz processor and 1tb HDD for 20$ month.... I but in reality that is what the entire machine had.

^ This.
Running my server on it's own dedicated hardware on it's own fiber line. I'm sure a lot of the problems people are having with their servers comes from the fact they're all VPS's crowded into a crap box to begin with, not even realizing the game database is stored in shared memory, then written to file only during backups. But every kiddie wants to be a pretend admin these days.