Eschalon: Book III - What the Hell Happened?

Basilisk Games has a new post on their forums about the launch of Eschalon: Book III.

So, what the hell happened last Friday?

Friday (Feb 14th) we launched Eschalon: Book III early in the morning. The web traffic was already starting to affect our site even before the launch, but we went ahead and announced it anyway. While we waited on the game files to be mirrored on to other sites, we had put local copies up for the first customers to be able to get (big mistake).

The demand was too great. You animals began grabbing the files like they were the last bottles of water and the world was about to end. The traffic crushed our website.

We called GoDaddy and were given some very bad advice: we were told that in order to fix this problem, we needed to upgrade our hosting platform (they should have just reset our connection and let us take the files offline). We were told the switch would take a couple hours, and that it would be transparent. This was misinformation by the GoDaddy "sales and support" staff. Here's a helpful tip: anytime a company combines "sales" and "support", you are going to get horrible advice. We later found out migrations actually take 24-72 hours, and it wasn't transparent...we'd be down the entire time.

Worse, the GoDaddy first-tier support technicians did not know what they were doing. We were moved from our Linux server to a Windows server. This caused the migration to fail and have to be restarted. After the first move to the new Windows server, we needed to switch again back to Linux, which is another migration of 24-72 hours.

Read the link for a more in-depth FAQ.