Several UK Hobby Web Stores Down - Blotz, Hasslefree, Vanguard

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**Charax**

As an IT guy for over 20 guys the prospect of hosting people's business sites with no redundancy or failover is both terrifying and unthinkable, I mean I'd at least clone onto a second cluster or something. Sure you'd maybe lose a week of data but you'd be up and running.

Also pretty shocked that all these established businesses went for a guy seemingly because he's a wargamer. There's a reason professional services exist, and if you're running an actual business from your website for the love of god host it somewhere with good industry rep (not just "a top bloke your mates have been using for years")

I hope they come back soon, I'm a fan of a lot of those companies and it will be a hell of a shame to see them suffer from this.

**Fayric**

I really appreciate the humanity in all this.
So great to see the hobby bussiness is largely so down to earth they all know a guy in his 60s that run a serverhosting in his garage.

Also hat of to Too fat lardies that realise there is other things in life than the hobby and wish him a good vacation in all this. Never heard of the guys before and would sure look up their website unless, uh, you know...

**NAVARRO**

This is how the vast majority of UK Miniature industry works.

Most these companies are only open because of the love their owners have for wargaming, they make little money and dont make much at all. From a business only cold perspective angle, its not worth quitting your daytime job for this.
So no one should be surprised that one IT wargammer will try its best to help out these small companies even though he's probably out of his depth.

In short, sometimes people here have a ridiculous idea that just because is a "company" and GW is doing well these guys are well off. You'd could not be more wrong.

So yes, support these companies which are mostly friends helping friends and fighting against Brexit, GW, economy, taxes etc...

**Talking Banana**

Navarro's take is exactly how I imagined most of the UK miniature industry works.

Best of luck to them all.

**Mad Doc Grotsnik**

It’d certainly easy to forget GW started out as a garage business, built up over time.

From some of the interviews with Old Timer Staff there was a decent amount of money being made even pre-Kirby, but it still started off tiny.

**Pacific**

This is a perfect time to remind that, if you are planning a project or getting some minis, don't hang around to do so. There is no guarantee these smaller mini companies will survive indefinitely!

There has been a massive outpouring of support for Vanguard within some of the Epic groups (really those minis have been central to help support Epic and similar small scale games over the years), hopefully that will translate to sales for Vanguard John.

**Kilkrazy**

I've got figures from several of the companies mentioned.

They look like the size of business which a few decades ago would have run purely by mail order. Too small to run their own web servers and e-commerce. More like Etsy shops than anything, except perhaps Etsy forbids to sale of guns and stuff.

**insaniak**

Charax wrote:

Also pretty shocked that all these established businesses went for a guy seemingly because he's a wargamer. There's a reason professional services exist, and if you're running an actual business from your website for the love of god host it somewhere with good industry rep (not just "a top bloke your mates have been using for years")

To time-poor and money-poor business owners with little tech knowledge of their own, the 'top bloke your mates are using' is somewhere with good industry rep. As others have pointed out, the UK gaming industry is fairly tight-knit, and a lot of these operators are just doing the best they can with the resources they have.

**infinite_array**

Bad news from TooFatLardies, posted on the FB page:

Good afternoon all. So, it's July the 12th and we are back in contact with our website managing company and, sadly, it isn't good news. Unfortunately all of our old site is irretrievably lost, as is the forum and all of our old emails.
This presents me with a difficult decision, not one I was unprepared for, but difficult nonetheless. Unfortunately, I have taken the decision to end our business relationship with our web provider and we are in the process of having a new web site built which will be hosted by a different company. This has not been an easy decision as, for the past ten years, we have had an excellent working relationship with the provider, a chap who is a wargamer and played a big part in bringing us into modernity with the integrated website, blog and forum. We wish Andy well for the future.
This is clearly a difficult time for TFL. I am heading for the US on Monday which means that I am not around to assist with the website build. It also means that we are unlikely to be up and running for two or three weeks. As I am sure many of you will be aware, wargaming is not a sector of business that creates millionaires, and this situation is a double whammy in that we will have no income for a month and also have the added expense of having a new website, forum, blog and email system built. Whilst we are not going to disappear (I signed the lease on a new storage unit today - poor timing to say the least) we are certainly seeing the financial reserves that we rely on for investment in the business and new products, disappear just to pay everyday costs. A wise man once told me that whilst being your own boss removes the ceiling of your potential earnings, it also removes the floor! We are certainly discovering that now.
In this situation, I can only thank our customers for their patience. As someone once said, "Things can only get better", at the moment we're just not sure when.

This likely means the same for any other site that was hit by the outage.

**Longstrider**

Oof. That's rough news all around for eveyone.

While I'm definitely sympathetic to the notion that webhosting is a professional service and people should be valuing it, I'm also sympathetic to the nature of garage businesses, where "I know a guy" carries a fair bit of weight, especially if you're of a time before social media and crowdsourced review websites.

**OrlandotheTechnicoloured**

Miniature Heroes has just emailed their customers to say their backups have been lost too so their website is going to need a total rebuild

so it sounds like all the users will be in the same position

**Crispy78**

What, were his backups kept on the same box or something? That guy's not a web developer, he's a f'ing liability. This was an accident waiting to happen.

**Overread**

infinite_array wrote:
Bad news from TooFatLardies, posted on the FB page:

Good afternoon all. So, it's July the 12th and we are back in contact with our website managing company and, sadly, it isn't good news. Unfortunately all of our old site is irretrievably lost, as is the forum and all of our old emails.
This presents me with a difficult decision, not one I was unprepared for, but difficult nonetheless. Unfortunately, I have taken the decision to end our business relationship with our web provider and we are in the process of having a new web site built which will be hosted by a different company. This has not been an easy decision as, for the past ten years, we have had an excellent working relationship with the provider, a chap who is a wargamer and played a big part in bringing us into modernity with the integrated website, blog and forum. We wish Andy well for the future.
This is clearly a difficult time for TFL. I am heading for the US on Monday which means that I am not around to assist with the website build. It also means that we are unlikely to be up and running for two or three weeks. As I am sure many of you will be aware, wargaming is not a sector of business that creates millionaires, and this situation is a double whammy in that we will have no income for a month and also have the added expense of having a new website, forum, blog and email system built. Whilst we are not going to disappear (I signed the lease on a new storage unit today - poor timing to say the least) we are certainly seeing the financial reserves that we rely on for investment in the business and new products, disappear just to pay everyday costs. A wise man once told me that whilst being your own boss removes the ceiling of your potential earnings, it also removes the floor! We are certainly discovering that now.
In this situation, I can only thank our customers for their patience. As someone once said, "Things can only get better", at the moment we're just not sure when.

This likely means the same for any other site that was hit by the outage.

The loss of things like mail lists is going to be a very hard hit for many of these firms that might not be felt for a while, but will certainly impact them. They are almost having to start afresh building a mailing and fanbase back up. That means losing out on a lot of casual customers that might not pay them any attention save for when a newsletter lands and the like. So they've likely got to work hard rebuilding and hoping that many of their previous customers signup to new mail services - and that's after at least another month of setting up new websites and facilities.

This will be a really big hit for the small firms that likely just ran more as a hobby/small time cash and perhaps aren't doing as many conventions/events/marketing outreach.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Crispy78 wrote:
What, were his backups kept on the same box or something? That guy's not a web developer, he's a f'ing liability. This was an accident waiting to happen.

Sad but true, and yet like a lot of business relationships you put trust in the people you hire to know how to do their job and to do it to a decent standard. So many of the people involved just trusted the web-guy to do his thing and whilst everything ran smooth it was a good relationship

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Kilkrazy wrote:
I've got figures from several of the companies mentioned.

They look like the size of business which a few decades ago would have run purely by mail order. Too small to run their own web servers and e-commerce. More like Etsy shops than anything, except perhaps Etsy forbids to sale of guns and stuff.

I don't know a LOT of 3D print merchants are selling models of every single kind on Etsy.
Then again it might well be a generational thing that most of these firms are just not keyed into web development and website evolution to really know that Etsy is a viable store for them. There's also the issue that etsy takes its own cut of sales and its not a single website but a vast webstore that you have to compete with everyone else on. Often as not people start an Etsy store and then attempt to hive off regular customers onto their own websites. Which is about the same as what al ot of people used to do with Ebay as well.

**Kid_Kyoto**

Just a reminder as these stores come back on line, if you like them, support them.

They really need orders now.

**KidCthulhu**

I hope this isn't the nail in Hasslefree's coffin. I love their products, but even before this outage there was trouble with orders.

**Slipspace**

Crispy78 wrote:
What, were his backups kept on the same box or something? That guy's not a web developer, he's a f'ing liability. This was an accident waiting to happen.

Agreed.

I have no idea how this can happen with even a basic knowledge of web admin, or just computing in general. It sounds like my folder full of recipes I commonly use has a better backup process than this guy had for websites he's being paid to host. The only thing I can think of is that the backups (if there were any) were on the same box as the websites and somehow he's trashed the entire system, which is impressive. When I worked on websites, my backup regime wasn't always 100% perfect, but even if I didn't have daily backups, I knew I'd have something recent enough to be able to get a site back up in some reasonable state relatively quickly.

I get that many of these businesses are passion projects and I sympathise to an extent given that web hosting and admin aren't usually the sort of skills you'd expect from someone who makes models. But, if your entire business hinges on online sales via your own website, maybe a little bit of due diligence is in order? Even as someone who knows nothing about websites, it's not difficult to go to three or four providers, ask some basic questions and get a decent grasp of what sort of things you need to be concerned about as a customer. Stage 1 of running a business reliant on your website would probably be having someone run it that you don't refer to as your "web elf".

**beast_gts**

Blotz wrote:We're back!
The Blotz website is now back up and running.
Not everything is 100% back yet, and some pictures (both on products and categories) are still missing, but it is functioning.
Obviously if you find any serious glitches, where something isn't functioning, please let us know
As always, the site is www.blotz.co.uk

**Kid_Kyoto**

That was fast! Wishing everyone a speedy recovery without too much lost business.

**Crispy78**

That's good news. Hopefully this has been a learning experience, and triggers a re-evaluation of backups, remote support access, etc...

**Slipspace**

Hopefully this also means the damage wasn't quite as bad as first thought. The info from TFL seemed pretty definitive that everything was gone. Would seem odd if that were the case for them but not for another company using the same service.

**Overread**

Slipspace wrote:
Hopefully this also means the damage wasn't quite as bad as first thought. The info from TFL seemed pretty definitive that everything was gone. Would seem odd if that were the case for them but not for another company using the same service.

Computers can be strange things ;but it might also be some of the firms kept local backups of some of their info; or that the backups that were present were spread over different drives or such

**Crispy78**

Overread wrote:

Computers can be strange things

*nods in IT*

**vanguard mini's**

VANGUARD MINIATURES NEWS

WEBSITE RESTORED

There is now a new version of the site active and ready to take orders. We have tried to retain the appearance of the old site for familiarity reasons and it may be a while before we are 100% finished with the rebuild but at least we are open again and ready to process orders once more.

We are truly sorry for any inconvenience caused by the server crash and the complete loss of the old site, rest assured that lessons have been learnt and this should never happen again. Customers will need to create a new account as all previous customer data was unrecoverable, I apologise again for the inconvenience.

I must thank all those customers and well wishers for their kind and thoughtful support in this trying period, so thank you one and all for all the offers of technical help and promises of future orders once we were active once more it has all been greatly appreciated.

Limited number of products being shown at this time, we are in the process of adding more as the data comes in and inventory is checked, the bulk of the 6mm products should be appearing on the site during this week but its going to be some time before every product is back up and the site gets a final polish.

But at least we are visible and able to continue trading now.

Many thanks for your patience.

https://vanguardminiatures.co.uk/

John

**OrlandotheTechnicoloured**

Miniature-Heroes

The shop is back, and open for business.

https://miniature-heroes.co.uk/

Many thanks to Reaper Miniatures & Darksword Miniatures for their help, and of course to Andy, who has been working flat out to get me back online again.
Things are a bit different this time though.

Just about all the Reaper products are in the shop now. But I've still a lot to do regarding the other sections.
Pre-ordering out of stock items is also finished for the time being. If it's on show, it's in stock. Stock levels are also shown on each single product listing.
The shop design is basic and functional. I hope you like it, and it helps you find what you want quickly.
All Reaper prices are 20% off their rrp. It works out that I am paying the VAT for you, so that's a big saving, and I think that makes me one of the cheapest retailers of Reaper products in the UK.

Thanks
Tim

**Pacific**

Great to see the websites that are back up and running.

Time to get that order in if you have been sitting on it for a while!