Science Fiction and documentary torrent tracker ScienceHD has been having a rocky ride in the past couple of days. Site has been down for the most part due to hosting issues but the good news is that most of these problems appear to be resolved by now. However, Sci-HD’s web interface may still look down for existing members who try to access it from the old URL https://sciencehd.net and its BitTorrent tracker may also appear to be offline. There is no need to panic as the site has moved to a new domain and is fully functional (it’s just that the old URL does not automatically redirect to the new location). A lengthy post on site homepage describes in detail what really happened:

ScienceHD%5B9%5D[1]

Please read at least the bold text!

These last few days have been the darkest our site has seen in our recorded history. We were planning to move our site resources to new hosts in order to increase security and stability, and well... obviously it didn't go that well.

Because of late delivery and miscommunication, our old hosting contracts expired before the new ones were started. Somewhere along the line of communication, wrong expiration dates were given (about a week off) and we planned by those dates. We finally managed to obtain and setup the site on a short-term server, but we're expecting to have another hour or so of downtime on Monday to move to the "real" site host. Luckily we knew there was a potential for this to occur, so we kept very current backups. We only lost a couple hours of activity, consisting of 3 posts and some client announces. No torrents were lost, and all user information remains secure and up-to-date. Our torrent swarms are currently quite dismal because of the domain change, but give it a couple days and that will quickly change

Unfortunately, we lost a large portion of our static content. We didn't back it up because we were expecting our static content host contract to last for another week. As a result, we lost our entire screenshot archives, about half our series icons, and a few of the latest style/javascript changes. Our largest loss is our screenshot archive, but that is not a vital part of the site's function and we should be able to rebuild the collection with your help.
A new thread will be made shortly, recruiting people to help us rebuild our screenshot. The details have yet to be finalized, but we may be offering individual freeleech to screenshot-cappers in order to accelerate the recovery process.

Another major problem some of you will have noticed, is our new domain. All your old torrents won't announce anymore! Well we've made a quick tool to fix that problem for you in two effortless clicks! The first click is to be made here, which will take you to our migration page. It will send you a zip file with all recently active torrents so you can easily mass-add them to your client and start seeding!

And in regards to ACTIVITY WEEK, the games remain on and they will be extended for around 2 days to make up for our unexpected downtime. Freeleech has been extended an additional 1 week, in addition to any prizes for the site mile-marker prizes.

-The ScienceHD Team

PS: HTTPS tracker is currently OFFLINE, however it will be back as soon as we get an SSL cert for our new domain.

As mentioned on the title of this post, SHD is now accessible from http://sciencehd.info/. Thankfully, no user data or torrents have been lost in the move. All user statistics including accounts and their ratio stats have been retained and the torrent index too has not suffered any losses. However the torrents you are already seeding/leeching will not work as they need to be updated with the new tracker information. To easily fix this, visit http://sciencehd.info/migration.php and follow instructions.

Site Name: ScienceHD (http://sciencehd.info/)

Signup URL: Closed

Invite Application URL: Closed

We’ve been getting a lot of mails from concerned readers who were unaware of the new domain – this article hopefully helped them get back on Sci-HD.


3 Comments

  1. Unknown // 1/03/2010 04:56:00 PM  

    http://www.ttinvite.com/tracker-reviews/44015-scenehd.html

    see full review here

  2. Unknown // 1/03/2010 08:58:00 PM  

    Luckily we knew there was a potential for this to occur, so we kept very current backups.

    We didn't back it up because we were expecting our static content host contract to last for another week


    Very confusing... They should make backup of all content of the website like every smart administrators do...

  3. Unknown // 1/03/2010 11:21:00 PM  

    Hold secondary backups of over 30,000 high definition screenshots that only get viewed a couple times across their entire lifetime?
    Even when the aforementioned content was already hosted in RAID1 across two different geographic locations?