What a catchy title, eh?

So as you all probably noticed, voat.co has been under a sustained DDoS attack almost all day today and 2 more times during the last 3 days. Now, instead of making performance optimizations and focusing on scalability, we also have to take measures to protect from DDoS attacks in the future. Support department from our current hosting provider probably hates my guts by now (sorry support techies if you're reading this). To this end, we are taking steps to migrate to a whole new infrastructure (Cloud Hosting) and also get one more level of protection. Both of these steps are significantly increasing our operating costs, but thanks to your donations, we are able to go through with this for a while. I can not reveal all details of this process for obvious reasons, but I want you to know that voat may be unstable during the next 24 hours while we are working on this.

@puttitout has been with me almost non-stop during the past 3 days, helping out and really pulling his weight. You guys should definitely not be giving me all the credits. He is awesome and I'm very fortunate to have him along for the ride.

@nurdoidz is the guy responsible for voat look and feel, he created voat light and dark themes from scratch and he also deserves a lot of credit. Without his contribution, voat would look like a geocities site from the 90s (developers are not usually good designers).

@danielflamino is the person responsible for markdown toolbar we all can use to give comments and posts the style we want without having to remember markdown code. He's also the guy that helped us test almost everything. Thanks man!

I also want to say how badly I want to be using voat, both on my phone and on my pc, interact with people and enjoy this site, but for the past 3 days, this wasn't possible, both because the site was usually down or because I was busy with helping keep the site up. I miss you guys and I promise I'll be more active here as soon as voat is stable.

I can't reveal all the plans I have for voat, but there are talks of patenting a certain new idea I had which would let you use voat in a whole new way which was never done before at this scale and on this kind of website. It's revolutionary to say the least and I get shivers even thinking about it :) We also plan to develop our own media hosting platform which would be tightly integrated into voat, but this will have to wait until we sort everything else out.

Finally, while DDoS attack was happening, I had the chance to process some of your donations and award donor badges. I know this isn't much, but that's the best I can do to show my appreciation. You are amazing and your donations really show just how important you think voat service is to you. If you donated but forgot to include your username, please send an email to [email protected] with your transaction ID or your name and we'll make sure you get your badge.