If you would like to know why Chat Hour was unavailable for over 2 weeks and why we changed the policy on age restrictions, you can read our previous updates below.


Original post on March 2, 2021

Dear Chat Hour members,

As you can see, Chat Hour is currently unavailable. Because of illegal conversations posted by our users on a different website, which is also owned by our company, our previous web hosting company (codero.com) decided to abruptly shut down every project we own including chathour.com. They will not allow us to transfer our data out over the network. The only thing they are offering is for us to pay them to get the hard drives back, which will also take a lot of time to process, ship, and transfer the data to this new server. Unfortunately, our backup data are also with them too. They mentioned that all our data could be wiped/erased within 10 or 15 days. We do not know at this point what we are going to do. Things are not easy for people who operate user-generated content websites. There is so much we have to deal with behind the scene in order to keep our site running over the years. I hope you can understand. We are very sorry that chathour.com is not up for you to chat with your friends today. Thank you very much for using our site over the years. Please feel free to write to us to share your thoughts at suggest (at) chathour (dot) com. Unfortunately, we might not be able to write back to everyone but we will read all the messages and post any updates here.

New updates on March 2, 2021 at 9:50 PM PST

It's been over 24 hours but the web hosting company never answered anything we asked. Everytime we called them, they kept telling us to wait for them to reply. It is pure frustration when they said they would erase our hard drives within 10 or 15 days. We have been trying to reach out to the CEO of Codero to see if he would help us get our data back quickly but it was impossible to reach him. Some CEOs care a lot about their customers' satisfactions. Anyone here knows Bill King, the CEO of Codero, please let us know. Unfortunately, we did not make a lot from a few ads on Chat Hour. So, it would be difficult to negotiate with them to get our data back quickly. Someone said in one of the messages we received that we should start charging our members but we never intend to do that. We want our chat site to be free. We also received many messages from others. Thank you very much for your words of encouragement and we are very sorry for the ones who got frustrated too. We know you do not want to lose your friends you connected on Chat Hour. I promise I will try to provide a way for everyone who is still around to communicate with one another on here. We are sorry we could not post contacts for everyone who made a request individually. If anyone still has any suggestions or comments, please send your message to the email address listed above. We will post more updates here.


New updates on March 3, 2021 at 10:40 PM PST

People sent us messages asking us what kind of illegal conversations that caused our web hoster to shut down all of our servers. We are going to describe it here. It looked to be some pedophiles posting their contact information to exchange illegal pictures. It was not on Chat Hour but we own the other website. We are in a difficult situation because it was a serious matter. We probably won't have a lot of options here. We are not hopeful about getting our data back soon. Because of that, we are already working on a brand new place similar to Chat Hour. We put together what we still have to make a temporary hangout for our chatters. Everyone will have to create a new account and the site might be a little buggy at first since we are trying to launch it as soon as we can to help people reconnect with their friends. We did receive a lot of messages from those who badly want to hear from their friends. You will have to look for them when the new place is ready. We will post more updates here.

New updates on March 4, 2021 at 10:05 PM PST

We have agreed to pay our previous web hosting company (codero.com) for the hard drives. We didn't have much of a choice. We were even begging them to allow us to transfer the data over a private network where our servers won't be accessible to the public but they didn't allow it. It was either pay up or lose the data within 10 or 15 days. They barely respond to our questions and concerns. There is not much we can do. We just have to accept all their terms. There were quite a few people writing to us that they really do not want to lose their old connections or something on their account. So, we'll try to recover everything. It will be a financial hit to us but hopefully, we are keeping something that is really important to someone. Some people mentioned they were happy to donate. We do not have a platform for that. If you want to support us right now, please check out our game listed on the banner at the bottom. If you like our game, please buy the premium version. Out of all our projects, the game is the only thing running properly right now. Everything else is broken including our dating site "111 Dating." If you are also using that, it won't be back up anytime soon. Many people asked questions about the new place we are building. Please don't expect a lot on this new site. It is just something we put together quickly from what we have without the hard drives. It will be a stripped-down version of Chat Hour with minimal features. You will be able to chat, of course. If everything is going smoothly, you can expect its beta version within a few days. We might have to use it for a while because it could take Codero some time to process the hard drives. They seem pretty unresponsive right now. We are sorry we won't be able to respond to most people who wrote to us. We read all your messages but there is a lot on our plates right now.

New updates on March 5, 2021 at 10:00 PM PST

Our temporary hangout is now running. It is called Another Chat. You can go there by typing http://www.anotherchat.com or http://www.chathourmobile.com. It is based on Chat Hour Mobile. Unfortunately, Chat Hour chat rooms are not supported and most notification emails such as friend request emails are not sent on this site. This is a brand new site without any data. Everyone has to create a new account. Because it is a new server, your verification code is likely to end up in your spam folder. When you verify your account, please keep that in mind. I hope everyone will enjoy our new temporary site. It might be a little buggy but we just want to launch it so you can get back in touch with your friends. Please feel free to report any major bugs at suggest (at) chathour (dot) com. We won't be fixing this site much since we are assuming that we'll move back to Chat Hour once we are able to extract data from the hard drives. The new site might not have a lot of people since new registration is required. You might have to wait a little longer before you have someone to chat with.

New updates on March 6, 2021 at 12:33 AM PST

We found out that our new server is blacklisted by both MSN network and mail.com network. You will not be able to sign up with those email addresses on Another Chat. We consider this a major issue. We are very sorry for the inconvenience. Please come back here for more updates.

New updates on March 6, 2021 at 3:35 PM PST

We had to change the IP address of the server in order to fix the MSN email issues. That was why everyone got kicked out of the site. If you are using msn.com, outlook.com, or hotmail.com email addresses, you should be able to sign up now. Since this is a brand new server, we are continuing to make changes and restart the server. We apologize for the inconvenience in advance.

New updates on March 7, 2021 at 9:47 AM PST

We are having issues with MSN network emails again. Yahoo network, which includes AOL, also started to delay our emails. Because all our members are creating accounts at the same time, we have to send out a lot of verification emails and email providers don't like that. To provide a better registration experience, we decided to only allow Gmail at this time. Other smaller email providers might work too. Unfortunately, you have a lot of issues when you move to a new server the same way you move in real life. We apologize for the inconvenience again.

New updates on March 13, 2021 at 10:13 AM PST

We haven't been posting anything new here lately because we are busy keeping the new site running and there wasn't anything much to update. Now we have some good news. We finally got our hard drives today. We haven't seen the data yet, though. Hopefully, everything on the hard drives is still intact. It could take a while for us to get the data out of the drives. These are not something you can just plug into any computers and transfer the data. We will need to find the right equipment. That was the main reason why we wanted Codero to let us transfer files over the network. It would have been much quicker and easier. We decided to set up a temporary site because we knew it could take some time to find the right equipment. We do not know when Chat Hour will be back up at this time but we will keep everyone posted on this blog. For people who are trying to sign up on the new site, the verification email issues should be fixed now for both MSN and Yahoo (including AOL). Hopefully, it will remain that way.

New updates on March 14, 2021 at 10:47 AM PDT

We have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that we managed to access the hard drives with the equipment we got in advance. The data on the drives seem fine too. The bad news is that we don't have the right network equipment for fast data transfers. We could transfer all the text data but uploading all the photos to our new server could take weeks. We are not a data center where all these images can be transferred very quickly. As a result, we think we are going to reopen Chat Hour without any photos. Right now, it seems like our best solution because we don't want to delay our reopening much longer. People have been asking us about our chat rooms and our mobile apps, which have been down for over two weeks and are not available on Another Chat. Also, from what we noticed on Another Chat, people posted their photos very quickly. Without photos, we should be able to reopen Chat Hour within a few days. If we are going with this solution, everyone will have their account information, their profile information, their friends, their favorites, their user-created chat rooms, etc. but not their photos.

When Chat Hour is back, there will be a major change in our policy. After long consideration, we have decided that we will no longer accept any new members who are under 18. Even though Chat Hour was not the site that caused our previous web hoster to shut down all of our servers, we learned from that lesson to make a change before things happen. If you are a current member under 18, you can still continue to use our site but we won't allow any new members under 18 to sign up. Eventually, everyone on our site will be 18 or older. As a former underaged chatter who didn't see anything wrong with talking to strangers online at that age, this wasn't an easy decision but we believe it is the right direction for Chat Hour right now.

Please feel free to tell us what you think by sending your comments to the email address we provided earlier.

New updates on March 15, 2021 at 10:46 PM PDT

It turns out that the photo file transfer process is not taking as much time as we originally thought. We are now expecting to have all the photos transferred to our new server within a day or so. For that reason, after the transfer is complete, we are going to revert all the photos back to the ones before the site went down abruptly in late February. All new photos uploaded in the last few days will be deleted.

We've been getting a lot of messages from our members at the moment. Thank you very much for writing to us. We are sorry that we may not be able to respond to all the messages at this time.

New updates on March 16, 2021 at 2:40 PM PDT

We took the server down to bring back old photos. Everything looks good to us. This is probably our last update since Chat Hour has been restored. To contact us, please visit our contact page.