So, we are back online on our 7th birthday. On august 13th, 2002 the site was launched first time, and now, on august 13th, 2009 it has been re-launced after more than half a year offline mode.

Past

This site was originally launched in summer of 2002 by men who are known as “Grant” and “Chelya”. While first scripts of the site were uploaded to a server earlier, official message about site opening was published on August 13th, 2002. That’s why that day is officially the site’s birthday.

Before it for two years there was an nhllightning.narod.ru site (doesn’t exist anymore). So you can fairly say, that the project at least 9 years old already.

If you are here for the first time, then, using «Internet Archive» archive.org you can see how the site look in first months and years of it’s existence.

For example, first site archive cache is dated October 17, 2002, when the site was just 2 months old, and here you can see how the site look on June 8, 2004, the next day after Lightning won the Stanley Cup.

But in 2008 after site was transferred to new hosting company Mobyhost (you can consider it as tampabaylightning.ru’s accusation of that hosting company) we started to experience problems.

First strike was laid on less than a year ago – the end of August 2008 – beginning of September 2008. The server went down. Well, actually it’s a common problem. Sometimes servers go down and you can’t do anything with this. But than we find out that Modyhost was just a reseller of Netherlands based hosting company, and never owned servers where our content was placed. That wasn’t noted in the contract – there was just something like “Mobyhost’s servers are located outside Russian Federation”, and not a word that they doesn’t own servers, and doesn’t have any influence in Netherland’s hosting company. So, they didn’t do anything to bring server up and the site was offline for a month. As the result, when the server finally went up we lost content that was published in a month before the fail. We didn’t received any compensation for that fail.

But that wasn’t the end. In that time me and Grant both experienced some personal peoblems, so we couldn’t spent time for the site. We had to stay with that hosting company despite it already showed their incompetence and impurity.

On November 11, 2008 I have received an e-mail from Mobyhost that the site is exceeds the limits of the server’s resources and I have to either “correct that problem” or buy other plan that is four time more expensive. Otherwise they will turn the hosting off. I asked them to provide server logs to find out exactly which script or procedure or query or reference or something else generates that load that exceeds the limits (I had access only to error logs, which doesn’t include that type of information). Would you be surprised if I say that they refused to provide those logs (I’m sure that’s because there was no any limits overruns). So I refused to do anything until they will provide those logs. And finally they turned the site off. I wanted to file lawsuit against them, but they registered in Izhevsk as legal body, that is more than thousand miles away from Moscow, and according to Russian legislation I could only file lawsuit against anyone only in court of the city where it registered as legal body. So the site went offline and I concentrated on my personal problems.

I had all that content and engine at my local server (my desktop, actually, which is running under Linux and have web server, MySQL, php and other services installed) and I tried to offer that content to someone else, who could run it, just because I didn’t have any time at all to re-launch the project, especially, taking into account that many information was lost. I proposed that content for example to BoltsProspects staff, but as I understand they had some technical issues with integration of that content into their engine.

Present

In July 2009 I’ve received notification that domain name tampabaylightning.ru is expiring. So I had to sit and think.

I’ve gave more than six years of serious work and data gathering for that site, so I couldn’t just throw it into trash. I called Grant and proposed him to re-launch the site basing on the content that I had. He accepted that idea with enthusiasm and so we started to work to launch the site on it’s 7th birthday (today).

We choose Zenon NSP as hosting company. I wouldn’t explain why, but we hope that there will be no such stories that it was with Mobyhost.

But anyway we can’t guarantee that it will not repeat.

Anyway. The site was re-launced today (Moscow time). We restored almost everything, except wallpapers, that were uploaded to the site between the server fail in September 2008 and it’s “death” in November 2008.

We have added some new options also. On the main page there are last 10 updated messageboards topics (mostly on Russian, as the messageboards itself). Also we added rss-feeds of some Lightning sites (i.e. BoltsProspects), blogs (Cristodero’s blog) and TBL Twitter.

Also we added a current month calendar, that will look like schedule once the playing time will come.

Even before the site “death” we have constructed a new module that include profiles of the players, who scored points against Lightning.

Some sad things. We also have an idea of creation multiusers hockey blogs, where anyone can set-up their own blog about hockey (not only Lightning). We actually did just that, but there are some technical issues with WordPress engine, so we likely wouldn’t use it. Currently new registrations are disabled and we are looking for a new engine for that project.

Future

Besides changes listed above, we have some ideas that will be implemented to the site in nearly future.

For example, we are planning to make a register of all players trades and signings.

Another sad thing (for users outside Russia). We decided to run mostly Russian side of the site. English content will stay as it is now but we wouldn’t update it (except rss-feeds and content that updated widely, such as new players, stats, records).

Currently we are working on site control panel. Once it would be ready we are going to, take an invitation to someone, who are ready to take all the English side of the site on him.

I don’t want to end this post with the sad news, so I’ll once again return to the beginning of the post and say: “We are back from the dead!”.