Intro

So a lot of you have been wondering why I haven’t posted anything since June of 2010 and want to know what happened to a bunch of the hosted sites.  Well a few things happened around that time.  First I changed jobs (I love my new job) but with that came more responsibility and therefore I could not spend really any time on this site.  The other thing is EdgeNetwork (the former owners of hlgaming.com) shut down their services.  I will be writing about both of these events here in a moment.

Job and Life Changes

So I changed jobs right around the time of my last post.  I know work for a great company that pays an actual fare wage.  During that time I also got addicted to Star Trek Online and a bit into Minecraft.  I ended up giving up Minecraft after 6 months as playing a game with really young people is no fun and downright annoying (thank god there was no voice chat).

Along with my primary job I also started to work heavily on launching MJCS Studios.  I created a few applications (one is one the Windows Phone Marketplace called “STO Profile Viewer” and the other is “Supreme Shortcuts” that allows you to customize your Windows phone).  This side business is starting to grow but slowly.

EdgeNetwork shuts down

So to my surprise Shawn from EdgeNetwork (the owner) decided to shut down all but one  of his sites (GTA Gaming) as the others just weren’t active or were not making any money (this was in mid-2010). Now if we rewind a bit to mid-2009 I had e-mailed Shawn about overhauling HLGaming.com.  He responded then that he was going to Shutdown HLGaming.com and all of the other sites and focus on GTA Gaming.  This ended up taking about a year to do so.

This is the e-mail I received from him:

I haven't gotten back to you because you've decided to do this resurrection at the worst of times, or maybe the best of times depending on perspective.

I'd already decided I was going to shutdown edgenetwork, have been going through and performing mass deletions on all the sites long dead as well as sites clearly abusing the lack of supervision.

Then this.

On the one hand, had it been a month later you decided to resurrect it, the entire site would've probably been deleted by then. On the other, I still don't want to consider responsibility of hlgaming anymore.

The basic plan was to strip the server of all hosted sites with exception to the only site that has continued to thrive for 6 years, gtagaming, and move it to a server of it's own, leaving behind all of the old edge backend, edgeid, and let that server die in peace. While Gtagaming continues on a new fresh server, edgenetwork being no more than just the business name behind it.

But hlgaming is now in the way of that, because I don't feel like I can just delete it anymore.

I own the domain for another year, but I suppose I can give you free use of it to work out what you want to do. Bottom line, I don't want to support any site other than gtagaming anymore. Also, I never knew IGN were shutting down their free hosting but all the same I'm not surprised, because it falls in line with the same reason I'm abandoning edgenetwork - there is no money in free hosted sites anymore.

Anyway this isn't happening immediately, there's countless sites still on the server I'm allowing for to leave first, although the longer this takes the longer gtagaming is stuck on a machine that is struggling to cope with it's traffic.
If you decide to continue with the site I can work out transferring it to you later.

This was the last time I heard from him.  I have tried to contact him time and time again to get the domain transferred and more importantly the databases (I already had backed up the files from FTP) but to no avail.  I tried finding his home address, phone numbers (the ones I had were disconnected.  I then tried twitter, Facebook (he is on my friends list), and ICQ (remember that service).

Then I tried contacting other members of the former EdgeNetwork staff but they had no contact information of his as well.  So by this time it is late 2011 and HLGaming.com is completely shut down and I am locked out of FTP, webmaster, and the other services.  So I have finally decided to contact a Private Investigator to find him and contact him.  This will cost me a bit of money but it is something I have to do…both to save your data and to save my reputation.

Hosting

Now once I get the data back (and I still think I will) I can either host you on my new dedicated server for free again or if you wish (and I don’t blame you) give you your data and pay for a free month of service over at BlueHost.  My new server is backed up 4 times a day so data loss is a moot point if you do choose to stay with me...but again I understand if you choose to leave me.

I am deeply sorry that I have not made what is going on apparent but I hope that this post clarifies what is going on.

This coming Monday I will be contacting a Private Investigator to locate Shawn.

If you wish to contact me further please DM me on Twitter @HL2Gaming