Regarding the recent site problems

[Vector 1,034]

So here's a brief explanation of what happened and what changes have I made to prevent future issues (I hope...)

The site was blocked by my host, due to causing performance issues, and all I know is it was related to downloads of the SAM Textures file. They provided me with a log, but all I could see was what caused the performance issue, was the action of downloading that file, still a bit unsure if what we did (me, @sh1ny and @shadowlost25) will solve anything or not.

Basically I subscribed to a service, where the files will be stored not on my host, but on a remote location (Amazon S3), in hopes that it will not get my server locked again in the future. This Amazon service will also guarantee faster Download rates to anyone, since it will "redirect" to regional servers I believe.

But with this came a whole lot of new problems. Because the host has a limit to the memory usage from PHP (which is normal in any hosting service), the automatic upload of files has a "limit" before the server runs out of allocated memory, or times out. While when uploading locally that memory was more than enough, apparently, when uploading to the Amazon servers, requires more memory, and after a few tests, me and @sh1ny verified that files bigger than around 110MB would fail to be uploaded.

So because of this, I have implemented a max file size that can be uploaded (25MB for attachments, and 110MB for Downloads). I know its a bit inconvenient, but thats the only way I can solve the issue for now, because hiring a better service will ofc inccur in higher expenses, and with absolutely no guarantee that would solve the file size limitation, which I am unable to cover at least for the time being, but will certainly do so if and when I'm able to.

So what I would advise to any modder that wishes to upload content from now on, is to keep their files no bigger than 100MB. This is easy to do, usually any compacting tool (WinZip, 7z, WinRar) always has a way to create multiple volumes up to a size of your chosing, so thats all you will need to do, to set up a file volume size. If anyone has any question regarding how to do it, I can post some screenshots. From what I've gathered, the only uploads that were bigger than 100MB were my own, so unless you upload a super mega mod, you should not have to worry about it.

This is only neccessary for any future upload, since we have manually uploaded the already existing files to Amazon S3, and the IP Board is able to see that they exist, and automatically skips the upload, and just updates the date.

Last but not least, I apologize for the time the server was down, but I wanted to take time in doing some tests to minimize the possibility of this happening again.

PS - In a couple of days, I will get back, and I will provide some explanations (with some evidence and mail transcripts/screenshots) so everyone can better understand what the hell happened... I've been away after I was, harassed and attacked, and I think it's about time I post at least some of the e-mail exchanges I had with LadyMoiriane, so everyone can judge for themselves, how things developed behind "closed doors". I have tried to to ignore this, but the moment people started to do character assassination and stealing my work, without even knowing what happened, is where I draw the line...
 

[sh1ny 187]

In addition to what @Vector said in the post, we currently have a problem with Downloads, specifically: a select number of files appear to be just 300-something bytes in size, thus being completely useless. It has to do something with IPS wrongly managing files in the S3 cloud; as we suspect it can be server performance related.
We’re on it, and a quick and dirty ‘fix’ appears to be working. If you encounter a file that is unreasonably small (less than a Kb in size and is not opening/working), please let me or Vector know about this and we’ll fix it ASAP. 

Don’t forget to check out our Discord channel! Go and introduce yourself or tell us where it hurts!

Cheers,
sh1ny

[Vector 1,034]

I have fixed all the files manually, but me and @sh1ny suspect that the issue might return in 24H or so, but we are keeping an eye on it.

If you are still getting just a file that is only a few Bytes (usually around 300 bytes) let us now exactly what is the file (Download, version, date)