TruckersReport was offline for two days, here are the details

As you're probably aware, the forum has been inaccessible for much of the last two days. I know this community is important to a lot of people, and I'm sorry for the disappointment that was caused. I can assure you that nails were bitten, teeth were gnashed, and sleep was lost in the attempt to bring the site back as soon as possible. A rundown of the events is below:

On Thursday morning, an error occurred in the forum database. A system reboot was attempted, but after shutting down the server wouldn't turn back on without impassable errors. TruckersReport's server is located in a 3[SUP]rd[/SUP]-party datacenter, and at this point we needed their technicians to get hands-on with the server and read its error outputs, as we could no longer communicate with it online, and our remote access hardware wasn't working. Unfortunately, the technicians assigned to our case were inexperienced with our server's operating system and negligent in their inspection of the server hardware. I thought we would be back online in a couple of hours, but we ended up waiting ~10 hours just to be able to access the server. A full inspection of the system was completed around 1am Eastern and no hardware issues were detected, so work began on restoring the server's operating system. Once the operating system was restored, all the parts of the site that weren't initially taken off-line by the forum database error quickly became available. Updates that occurred during the reboot process made some parts of the site incompatible, and we weren't able to restore the forum until those issues had been identified. The final problem was located ~11pm Eastern on Friday, and the forum was re-opened minutes later. Thanks goes out to Anthony, as well as Matt, Vasyl, and the WebHostingBuzz.com team, all of whom were indispensable in getting us running again.

Over the past year, I've invested in our hardware and software infrastructure in order to make TruckersReport faster and more reliable for our members and visitors. Obviously this failure over the past two days was a huge disappointment to me, but I've learned difficult lessons and I'll use that knowledge to make new investments and design a better system to reduce the impact of server problems in the future.

Thank you all for your patience these past two days. I appreciate that everyone puts so much passion into the community, and I'm really sorry that everyone was inconvenienced by this failure.

Sincerely,
Sam

Edit @ 11:47am Saturday: Thanks for the kind words, everyone! Thanks for being so understanding, and thanks for all your participation. Yes, there are a number of bugs that still need to be fixed, I'm hoping we can nail them all this weekend or possibly Monday.

Edit @ 2:09pm Saturday: All of the bug reports that I've received so far have been fixed, but I'll bet there are more out there that haven't been brought to the moderators' attention yet. Please let me know when you find one and we'll keep fixing.