Question

Dawkind

Dawkind

Platinum Member
Joined
Apr 3, 2000
Messages
13,030
Does anyone else use Fototime for hosting and found their exchange server has been dark for going on a week?

I get a weekly scam/virus/malware update and there was a Worldwide Malware and I’m wondering if they’ve been affected?

I’ve got many thousands of photos I cannot access... :(
 
Malware Attack....this forum software is sooooo f’d up I can’t edit my own post and have to be asked if o really like something. WTF?! :(:(:(
 
Look no further than Coop's gallery in the stickies. Most of that thread is out right now for the same reason. I really hope it is restored!
 
Hey Dudley,

I wrote three involved posts on the last page of my Gallery about this. I did a BUNCH of research.

Bottom line: We're screwed. Fototime owners bailed on us without a word.

I have 18 years and thousands of images in hundreds of threads, ALL unviewable.

Sigh.
 
SharpByCoop said:
Hey Dudley,

We're screwed. Fototime owners bailed on us without a word....
Click to expand...

Sigh is right....I, too, am right in there with you my friend....many years, many pictures that can't ever be replaced, and I just upgraded my subscription last month because I was pushing my bandwidth. :(:mad:
 
I'm in the same boat with you folks, all my on line photo posting was through Fototime. I'm scrambling, trying to figure out the next step.
 
BTW: If you had a signature image hosted through Fototime, please eliminate that.

I'm finding it takes a minute for the pages to complete loading, because there is no resolve from FT.
 
Dudley, all of my images, other than what I might also have kept on my hard drive, are nowhere to be found. I realized the problem was immense once I had read Coop's most recent posts relative to Fototime.

Beginning to look like the Fototime ship has sunk...............
 
Dawkind said:
Does anyone else use Fototime for hosting and found their exchange server has been dark for going on a week?

I get a weekly scam/virus/malware update and there was a Worldwide Malware and I’m wondering if they’ve been affected?

I’ve got many thousands of photos I cannot access... :(
Click to expand...

There was a fire in OHV server rooms few days ago and many sites went down either due to the fire damage or repair works. That might be the cause.
BTW, It just gives me chills how fragile our civilisation is. Everything we have now is bunch of ones and zeroes, all what takes to make it gone is a fire in one unfortunate place....
 
OHV server fire in France: Nope. I was actually HOPING this was the case.

I talked directly with a tech at Dallas Infrastructure Services, LLC, who stated their (Fototime's ISP) servers were OK. However he would not go any further to allow WHY the site was down. He was guarded and said he would pass my query back to the owners.... :rolleyes: Well that was three days ago.

Karl and Jeff simply bailed on us. Like many of you I re-upped my subscription in January. On another post in another forum, one fellow said he'd talked to Karl about an uploading issue three days before the outage and he was guided through it successfuly. Then, BAM it's gone. :poop:

I NEVER use the stinkypoo icon. It works today.
 
I just came upon this thread through a google search..

I am in the same boat..i have been a paying fototime customer for well over 10 years (maybe even 20) and had probably 20,000 pics uploaded. my personal Blog was linked to thousands of those pics.

while i have multiple backups of all my pics, of course all the links are dead. I have joined SmugMug and have started to re-upload but i dont think i have the patience to re-create it all...it would take months anyway.

and to think of every post i have ever made online in the past 20 years is just unimaginable...it's like this has killed my entire online presence.

all of this with no warning, no explanation, no remedy or compensation...it should be criminal.

RL
 
I posted this in my other thread:

More on DEFUNCT Fototime. Posted on another forum. Three pages of grousing!

Also: As of today, they have also deleted their outdated Facebook page. All very telling.

Hi Everybody,

I was referred to this site by a poster on Fototime's Facebook page. Several Fototime users landed there in search of an answer. I posted there as "Elaine-iaK Chocolat" and I will repeat the information I posted there.

This is the information I found in a Google search of the company;

Fototime was registered under:
Andrew Pitts
6711 Atlanta Dr.
Colleyville, TX 76034

Fototime's President:
Karl Swierenga
12660 Hillcrest Rd #4201
Dallas, TX 76230
Karl also owns KPS Solutions and Equitystat Solutions (I researched both companies and left messages wherever possible.)
A number I found for Karl is (214) 923-2806. I left a phone message; no response. I also located his personal FB page; no luck there.

Fototime's V.P.:
Jeff Kelling
3803 Cibola Trail
Carrollton, TX 75007

My frustration with Fototime going out of business (which I have assumed they have) is that I had built photo albums with detailed descriptions of my travels before blogs came along. I have hard copy backups of the photos as well as backing up my computer to Carbonite; however, I really enjoyed going back to Fototime to look through my albums and seeing the photo descriptions. I have done a ton of traveling, so friends and fellow travel club members would refer to my site as well.

FRUSTRATING!

Bastards. Really unfair from every standpoint. I don't care that I'm posting personal info publicly. They SCREWED us. :mad:

I would think those who paid would also have recourse with the Texas office of (?). I PAID for a year's subscription in 2021 and now only got 6 weeks worth.
 
their Twitter account has also been deleted.

i renewed my subscription in Dec so only got 3 months out of it...but it is not the money..even if were to get back that $225, it wouldnt be anything near the amount of time i will have to spend re-building.

from the posts i have read here and there it seems like they had MANY long time customers in the same situation
 
Some have their own site to post pictures, then you have total control. It dies with you...
 
Looks like I’m screwed too. Mike
FotoTime
On March 10, due to circumstances beyond our control, FotoTime suffered a catastrophic outage. This outage effected both the infrastructure and data. Regretably, due to this outage, FotoTime has ceased operations.
We would like to thank all of our customers for supporting us all of these years. This difficult decision to cease operations was the only option available to us.
 
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Hey Mike, where did you glean that info? ^^

I hardly believe it. They would have responded in kind when they HAD a Facebook account, or their Twitter account as it happened. No, they chose to delete my query on their FB page along with other annoyances and then they deleted the whole thing.

Because of enormous dissatisfaction from many they are submitting the 'We had no option' card.

NO long-term data service operates without a backup. Other Dallas Infrastructure Services LLC businesses (their hosting ISP) are chugging along.

I cry bullshit.
 
And if these sorry mf’ers did cease operations and are so ‘sorry’....where’s my refund, let alone my 25,000 pictures?!

Like most, I just renewed my subscription on 2/12 for 24Gb and....[...]
 
That sucks, hopefully you guys had backups. Never trust one source that's out of your control with your images, always have a backup. External drives are cheap. I keep one backup attached to my pc, and one off site in a firesafe with a relative that is a carbon copy of mine and gets copied from main source a few times a year. This way if ever something occurs, I've got full control of my situation and at worse I lose a month or two of images at most.

Also yet another shinning example of why bladeforums needs to move into the 2010s finally and start hosting the content people put here. At this point I'd wager 75+% of all images ever posted on this site are dead links. Just stupid of owner here to not want content on his content driven forum...

Also make sure to charge back those membership fees. Screw these guys! They were charging to host your images with zero mirroring.. they obviously were using those servers in Europe that burned down, and to just fold up shop says it all, they were shady and just trying to milk subscribers for every penny they could without any regard for the service provided
 
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