I know this especially concerns RPers, so I thought I'd post something here.
The downtime we recently experienced is a pretty terrible and
rare event for a professional hosting company. It won't happen again anytime soon. The host we're on is a major hosting company that serves probably tens of thousands of customers, including all the other major Digimon sites I can think of. That only DDF was affected is our good luck.
I know what it's like to lose data -- a very, very bad thing. And not knowing whether it's lost is almost as bad. This applies to all fanfics and fanart too, but most people have those saved on their computer anyway. RPs are different. They exist only on the forums.
Even if the site goes down, you will not lose your RP.In this case, I didn't have FTP access until the end, but there are a lot of variables here:
-DDF itself and the database are hosted on different servers. So unless you see an error like "SMF cannot connect to the database" for a very long time, then all your data is still fine, chilling on a server with no forum to access it.
-Even in the event the database server goes down (it's supposed to have 99.999% uptime -- that's a lot) and somehow loses data, the host keeps backups, and is pretty prompt about restoring them.
-Even in the extremely unlikely event that the host goes bankrupt and deletes everything, I have a backup of the database, and I make such backups regularly! So even if TKT and I decide that DDF must die as a massive explosion takes place in the hosting data center, I can still provide you with all your RPs!
But this is all moot, cause the site ain't going down again anytime soon.
