Vamerites, I must apologise for all of the downtime that Vamers and Vamers Store have been receiving as of late.

I have been working daily with our hosting company over the last two weeks to try and identify what is causing our server to stall and effectively crash.

From painstakingly slow ‘trial and error’ scenarios that required disabling one feature of the site at a time, to simply taking the site offline in order to stabilise the server; the search for the cause of the downtime we have been experiencing has been frustratingly tiresome.

After many hours of troubleshooting, our hosting provider and I became aware of an unnerving ‘trend’. Whenever the server appeared to stall, the Vamers sites would experience an incredible surge of ‘traffic’. Normally this would be a good sign, but the traffic has been identified as ‘brute force attacks’. In one instance, over 2 million attempts were recorded in under 24 hours.

Thankfully, none of our sites were accessed or compromised in anyway. In fact, security is incredibly important to us, especially with Vamers Store which does not store any sensitive data and is fully PCL compliant (all transactions are 100% encrypted and secured through our third-party payment gateways).

In an attempt to prevent these kinds of issues from affecting the sites again, additional security measures have been put in place, from a server standpoint and by means of software. I am certain that the implemented solutions will make a difference. After all, I am heavily invested in these sites and my heart skips a beat each time I become aware of the sites going ‘offline’.

I hope that everything will begin to return to normal soon and I do apologise for any inconvenience caused from our downtime.

I am blessed and proud of how Vamers has grown over the years, and I will continue to ensure that we remain proactive, in terms of security, as the brand continues to mature.

Live long and geek on!

Owner, founder and editor-in-chief at Vamers, Hans has a vested interest in geek culture and the interactive entertainment industry. With a Masters degree in Communications and Ludology, he is well read and versed in matters relating to video games and communication media, among many other topics of interest.