Hosting Debacle November-2024
So, the web hosting company I have been using decided to triple (3x) the price without asking or informing me about it at all. It goes without saying that I won't be doing any business ever again with any entity behaving like that.
After some not-so-happy exchange of messages, BANG, they turned off my hosting! So I effectively lost the conflict-series hosting and the Hall of Fame (HOF) database.
I will be falling back to the old cloudworth domain that I have been using forever for various things, and even for this game series too in the first years of its existence. I can restore most of the scores instantly but some of the latest scores will slowly added back, so patience.
I'm not sure if I manage to transfer the domain to the old hosting company, so the links in apps might be pointing to a non-existing HOF until the next round of updates rolls out.
If you finish a game while the HOF-server is not available, the score should be fine on your device, and once the app updates itself, that score should be sent to the new server. If you finished that game before 17th November 2024, the updated app will try to resend those scores too, so the HOF should eventually be back to normal, bar some rare edge cases where the player happened to wipe out his phone and all data in it
The saddest thing is that many years ago I chose this hosting company precisely because it was created by a man who was completely tired of hosting companies being greedy, underhanded scoundrels. Turns out, he sold the company some time ago. I miss the days when people who created a business, stayed with that business their whole life, there was a strong feeling of trust that everything would continue the same reliable way. I understand the temptation to sell your creation to a big faceless corporation for a big pile of cash, but, it's not so much fun being a customer to those greedy oh-did-we-forget-to-say-we-tripled-the-prices bloodsuckers.
"No plan survives contact with the enemy."
— Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, describing the unpredictability of war and how outcomes can diverge from strategy