Unclaimed Land had a fatal crash on the 1st December at around 12:30pm [GMT] – below is the timeline of restoration of services along with an overview of the root cause.
- 1st December 12:30 GMT – The front end of the website crashed. We use a separate server to running our powerful mapping services so all mapping services continued as usual.
- 2nd December – The fatal crash was discovered by the web-admin (Rafe Roughton). I crafted a plan to map out working services and bring about a restoration of services as soon as possible.
- 4-5th December – All our front-end services (maps) come online and are accessible free or charge to all users.
- 9th December – I undertook a full restore using back-ups. This restores all pages and services which the site previously hosted. It did not restore our users accounts which are permanently lost. We never have access to even the accounts names for privacy reasons which means we cannot directly restore accounts.
- 12th December – I realised the restoration of back-ups meant the restoration of the pay-wall. Given we had not restored any accounts, this was unacceptable so we rolled back our payments system to restore free to access maps.
- 14th December – Using payment profiles stored at Stripe we restored all user accounts using email address only. All users received a free 2-month extension on their subscription. In case we missed any users we have integrated a user restoration service which, one we verify authenticity, will allow us to quickly restore services to our paid customers.
Future Improvements
This is our second failure of front-end services (previously crashed in April 2024). The core of our services (our mapping system) has been working at 100% up-time for well over a year. Out front-end systems are very basic in nature but, to protect our customers information, we do not store any user information which does prove a dilemma (we cannot restore user information as we do not have that). We have access to our customers email address only through our payments system provider (Stripe or PayPal) but nothing is stored on site.
So how are we going to help mitigate this risk in future and provide a better user experience?
We will never store user information, ever. So, if our front ends systems go down it will take a couple of weeks to bring back online.
Our Future Plan: We are developing a back-up system which will allow our users direct access to the maps without signing in. This emergency system will only become active during an emergency situation and will be deactivated once we have restored services. All users will be provided with a spreadsheet with direct links to emergency maps. This system should be up and running by the end of January 2025.
Any Advice?
Please contact us if you have any queries, advice or disputes with how we have managed this difficult period. I would be very interested in hearing your opinion in order to provide the best possible experience. Once again, I do apologise for the poor service over the last two weeks. As a one-man-team, restoring a disruption is tough but I want to work with all our users to provide the best possible experience. If you are an old customer and your account is not working (even when you request a password reset) please go to account recovery.