SYNK Radio is back (and why it went down)

If you tried to listen to SYNK Radio over the last couple of days, you probably noticed it was dead. There was no music, the website wouldn't load, and the stream was completely silent.

It was a total nightmare.

How I found out

I didn't even know it had happened at first. I woke up to a DM from one of my mates telling me the station was down. They sent me a screenshot of a Cloudflare 523 error, which basically means Cloudflare couldn't talk to my server anymore.

I dragged myself out of bed to check the status, hoping it was just a glitch or a restart needed. It wasn't.

The server vanished

I logged into my VPS provider's control panel and found that they had completely revoked my server. They didn't send a warning email. They didn't give me a heads-up. They just deleted it.

One minute the station was broadcasting, and the next it was gone. The entire instance had just vanished. It is actually terrifying how quickly a digital service can just disappear when you rely on the wrong people. I lost the entire environment in a second.

Moving to Hostinger

I wasn't going to risk that happening again with another cheap provider. I have spent the last two days scrambling to move the entire infrastructure over to Hostinger.

They are a massive company, so I am hoping I can actually trust them to keep the lights on. It took a while to configure the new environment because I had to set everything up from scratch, but the station is finally running on a server that shouldn't disappear overnight.

Backups are a lifesaver

If you take anything away from this post, let it be this. Please make backups for anything you make. Stuff can happen very quickly and without you knowing.

Here is the thing about backups though. Everyone tells you to make them, but you don't realise how important they are until your server gets nuked. I thankfully had backups stored locally. They were a little old because I hadn't automated the process as well as I should have, but they worked.

I managed to restore the database and get the station back online without losing the core data. If I hadn't made that manual backup a while ago, SYNK would probably be dead for good right now.

The one thing I lost

While the music is back, it is not a total win.

I lost the source code for the custom file sharing and hosting platform I built. It wasn't included in the backup I had on file.

I am honestly so angry about this. I spent weeks writing that code to handle file uploads and hosting perfectly, and now it is just gone. I can't even recover it. I have to rebuild that entire system from scratch. It is incredibly frustrating to see all that hard work just evaporate, but at least the radio station itself is safe.

We are live again. You can tune in at synkradio.co.uk.

– Blake

February 11, 2026