Between August 28th and August 30th, Filmtracks experienced the longest downtime in its 23-year history. The 52-hour outage was caused by the site's service provider (server host), NTT Communications, which intentionally shut down the site due to the erroneous assumption that Filmtracks did not wish to continue utilizing the host's services.

NTT is forcing websites hosted on its legacy cloud-based servers to migrate to a newer range of cloud services, and I learned only today that Filmtracks is one of them. Unfortunately, NTT never contacted me by email, snail mail, phone, or administrative portal notice about this necessary migration ahead of the date at which NTT decided to suspend services for companies still existing on their older cloud. The poor folks in NTT's technical support crew had to break the news.

Having been hosted by NTT (or its partners or acquired companies) since 1995, Filmtracks is owed better service. Any hosting provider intending to suspend a company's website, data, or email should exercise due diligence in contacting that client by multiple means to alert it of the impending elimination of service. NTT did not take such actions; in fact, the account manager for my service has been on a multi-month maternity leave during this entire event. Furthermore, it took two days of my hassling of NTT's technical support to learn what happened.

What does this mean for Filmtracks from here? Now that NTT has restored access to the site after my complaints, it appears that everything on the current, legacy server is stable at the moment. I likely lost some incoming email. I will conduct manual backups and prepare to migrate to a new server over the next week. Whether I continue as an NTT client depends on that company's willingness to allow me the migration time I require and a sizable service discount for the downtime.

Please note that this downtime has nothing to do with slow load times of the site experienced by overseas visitors, especially those in Europe. That is a separate DNS-related issue that has been ongoing for months and is outside of my control while on my legacy server. There is a possibility that this issue will resolve after I migrate the site.

It should go without saying that there will be no new review coverage in the near future while these existential issues are sorted out. To say that 2019 has been frustrating for Filmtracks would be a massive understatement. That said, I do thank everyone for the continued support… even the indelible trolls!

Christian