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Alexey Smirnov
Alexey Smirnov

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My hosting got hit by a cyberattack and my game's database was wiped: how I moved a browser football manager to a new server

#webdev #gamedev #javascript #devops

I'm a solo developer building MLiga, a free multiplayer football manager that runs in the browser. A few days ago the hosting provider where it lived was hit by a cyberattack, and the database was deleted — every club, every match, the whole league history. Here is what I did next, and what I'd do differently.

The situation

The game is a single HTML file plus a small Node.js server. The server runs the same game code that runs in the browser, simulates league rounds on a schedule and stores everything in SQLite. When the provider's incident wiped the database, there was nothing to restore from: my only backups lived on the same server.

I had two options: shut the project down or move fast and restart. I chose to restart.

What I did

  1. Rented a VPS and set up the server from scratch with a short install script, so a rebuild takes minutes instead of hours.
  2. Moved to a new domain and enabled HTTPS with Let's Encrypt.
  3. Set up automatic backups of the database on the server, plus a small Python script on my own computer that downloads a copy on demand. Now a copy lives outside the server.
  4. Restored notifications to the community pages. Telegram is not reachable directly from my server's network, so I put a tiny proxy in front of the Bot API using a Cloudflare Worker. Large photo uploads kept dropping the connection, so the code now falls back to a text message if the picture fails.
  5. Restarted the league from round 1. Everyone starts from zero, which at least makes it a fair moment for newcomers to join.

Lessons

  • Backups on the same server are not backups. Keep at least one copy somewhere else, and test that you can restore it.
  • Make the setup repeatable. A single script that installs everything saved me.
  • Tell your players quickly and honestly. I added a notice at the top of the game explaining what happened and why everyone starts from round 1. People were more understanding than I expected.
  • Small fallbacks matter. The Telegram picture-to-text fallback is three lines of code and keeps announcements working.

Try it

I recently added a guest mode so that new players can try the game without signing up: pick a club in Belgium, enter just a name and play. After a minute the game offers to save your progress with a login and password; if you skip it, the guest and the club are removed after 2 hours.

Play here (free, in the browser): https://mliga.su/?guest=1&lang=en

If you try it, I'd love your feedback: is the guest start clear, and is anything confusing in the first few minutes?

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