Regarding the .NET Server Cluster

As many of you know the .net server cluster went down approximately 3.5 weeks ago. After many attempts to find answers and get help to get the servers back online and the sites back up and running we were informed that the computers had been seized by police for being built with stolen computer parts. The 5 servers that made up the .NET cluster were not the only ones taken so it wasn't anything related specifically to us or our operations.

We attempted to purchase the hard drives to no avail and were told that because the websites are considered "intangible" they are not concerned with their recovery. So over 300 websites vanished from the web. Something we are not happy with, and honestly don't know what to do.

As many of you know, we were doing weekly backups of the sites, these backups are stored on secondary drives on the servers. This is normally not a problem because when a site goes down, we have the backup on the other drive and can load it up and have it back up and running. The only problem in this case is that the whole server cluster, backups and all, are gone and not available to us to restore the websites with.

Oh but wait, it gets better.

After some picking and prying we learned that the group we had leased the servers from, is not actually in Texas as we were led to believe.With some prompting by one of our clients who wanted to file a lawsuit against them, we found out they are not even in the United States at all but in Islamabad, Pakistan. Needless to say we are not thrilled with this whole thing.

We are however pleased to say that we have managed to get many of the accounts they receive payments through shut down. They had multiple payment processors iincluding PayPal, all of which we have helped to get suspended or removed.

Valhalla Computers was not the only business affected by them, and we are now looking into what we can do seeing as how these people are in Pakistan. That fact changes the dynamics of legal options tremendously.

For those of you that did have a website on our .NET cluster ( you can tell if you did because the nameservers for your domain end in .NET - it doesn't matter if your website was a .com, the nameservers used to point it to the servers were .NET ); we are willing to restore your hosting accounts, install ZenCart or Wordpress, and if able to we will help to create a new template for your site. Unfortunately that is the extent of what we can do without the backups of the site to completely restore your sites and data. We are still honouring the lifetime hosting, that is not even to be questioned because we are still offering to host your account even if it means putting your services on another server.

Just in case you're wondering where in the world Islamabad is, here's a map.