The Sonic Stadium and all its hosted sites suffered two more days of downtime, less than two days after the Sonic Site Awards opened for voting.
Earlier in the month, the recently released next-generation Sonic promotional video made available on the main site, caused a short downtime for overuse of bandwidth, as a result of it unexpectedly not being protected from hotlinking. Direct links on a multitude of sites and blogs resulted in 220 GigaBytes – over half of the Stadium’s quota – being transferred, of that one file alone.
Late on the 17th, the injection of bandwidth from this first problem ran out, and all the sites again went offline, including Sonic News and the Sonic Site Awards. Around 4PM GMT on the 20th, the Stadium was again provided with an injection sufficient to last until the next quota reset at the end of the month.
As a result of this third recent downtime, Sonic News has organized a backup server for its PHP feeds. This backup is updated daily from the standard feed. All Webmasters of sites that use SN’s ticker or headlines are recommended to change their code accordingly:
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Sonic News’ Javascript feeds do not currently have a backup.