[deanhills]

@deanhills

Did you guys have access to Admin functions of the forum or for database backups ? I guess that's the only way to do something about getting the forum online again. I guess there is no way to claim the domain or hosting the forum under it again even if you able to recover a backup copy. Since there is no way to sort out Nameservers.

I still can't grasp the fact there wasn't a single person in forum who knew him personally or had a direct contact with him. After all these social media and communication methods. or He must be quite a secretive person.

No one other than the owner has access to Frihost Admin panel.  It's not a typical Forum by any interpretation of a phpBB Forum that you and I know.  The owner in 2005 had great fun with completely reprogramming phpBB 2.0.  He had it such that only he could do the major inputs for Admin changes including backups. Also it was not possible to upgrade it as we would upgrade our Forums.  It was never upgraded from 2.0 as it would have been a horrific job to do - he'd have to recode a lot of things and after 2013 he didn't have the time to do that. It was a terrific panel though in its hey day.  At the time when he was 100% focused (while he was a student) he had the Forum such that hosting could be created from the panel as well.  For a while there were other Admin who had access, but as time went on and by 2014 when the servers were relocated from the US to Germany he was the only one with access to three of the servers including the server with the Forums on it.

The greatest problem happened during mid-2014 when the Servers had to be moved in a great hurry from a Data Centre in the US to Germany.  Do you remember the Burstnet Data Center scandal of Scranton, Pennsylvania in July 2014?  Burstnet used to be very popular for Admin from Europe as well as it was good quality very low cost center.  Then its owners sold it quick-haste to some one who didn't know what they were doing.  They tried to move all of the servers to North Carolina, at only a moment's notice, such that quite a large number of the Admin lost complete access to their servers and data.  The owner of Frihost was lucky, took about 2 weeks down, but at some or other point he was able to get access, and then had to move all of the servers post haste. He did it to a really solid Datacentre in Germany. 

Problem was however that the owner needed to do lots of retooling and coding of the Forum to make all of its functions work again including possibly backups, and he never got to doing that because he didn't have the time.  There were a number of members who had joined in 2006 who couldn't get access to their hosting accounts as the hosting accounts had been hand coded.  Existing members who needed to reset passwords couldn't do so and couldn't access their Forum accounts. Maintenance requests to the owner went completely unanswered. I get a feeling that maybe the lack of retooling also affected the backups.  Like a certain amount of retooling had to be done to get backups to be taken and maybe there had been no backups taken since 2014 after the server move.  So who knows, maybe the owner had already decided in 2014 if he couldn't find the necessary time for retooling the Forum, that if the Forum went down, that that would be the end.  Miraculous that it lasted until May 2018.

The above is just a calculated "guess" of course.  No one of the staff has a clue really.  I could be wrong of course as well.    I do think however that possibly no backups were taken since 2014 and that at some or other point a decision (without it really being a conscious decision maybe more procrastinated decision) may have been taken to let Frihost go if it should "melt down".  I still hope that the staff will be contacted before the hosting comes to an end. The hosting is pretty awesome.  Ironically the best its ever been including during the best of Frihost Forum times.  So there's lots to be thankful for.