Forum Issues

[ElkinFencer10]

Is just I, or has the forum been going down a lot lately? Several times over the past few days, I'll random be unable to get to the site, and when I enter it into downforeveryoneorjustme, it says it's down, too. Just curious if it's routine maintenance or if there's a problem with the site.

[Flake]

The site is fine but we've had some issues with the hosting provider. Nick is aware and he'll look at options if the issues persist. At least it isn't as bad as the SQL error days of a few years ago.

[ElkinFencer10]

Gotcha. I figured Nick was looking into it; I was just curious and nosy. This site is, after all, how I spend half of my spare time.

[Flake]

You're definitely not alone! We just run into the issue sometimes of the site not generating a whole lot of revenue and high quality hosting is expensive. So there's a compromise that has to be made between the quality of the hosting and the cost associated with it.

[ElkinFencer10]

You're definitely not alone! We just run into the issue sometimes of the site not generating a whole lot of revenue and high quality hosting is expensive. So there's a compromise that has to be made between the quality of the hosting and the cost associated with it.

Is there a PayPal or something where members can donate to help with hosting costs? My salary's not that high, but I'd be willing to chip in what I can here and there to help out.

[Flake]

We've played with that idea in the past but there's never been a huge amount of effort put into it. Generally speaking, as long as you disable your adblock for this site and click through any advertisements that link to a store that you would have wanted to shop at anyway, you're good! From what I understand, it does not cost Nick a lot of money to keep the site around as is but no one wants him to go out of pocket.

[Fragems]

Seriously I wouldn't mind donating to a fundraiser for the site a lot of other sites I frequent do it on a yearly basis. If it meant the possibility of the site not going down 2-3 times a week(usually right as I'm finishing a post ) I wouldn't mind throwing money towards it.



As far as the ads go I usually go right to the forums and I've never noticed any ads here. If you had a post with referral links I could set them as my bookmarks for when I access sites such as Amazon on a daily basis.

[ElkinFencer10]

As far as the ads go I usually go right to the forums and I've never noticed any ads here. If you had a post with referral links I could set them as my bookmarks for when I access sites such as Amazon on a daily basis.

Same here. If nothing else, I mean, if all of us regulars chipped in just a few bucks a month, we could probably keep Nick from having to go out of pocket at all.

[JoeAwesome]

Another auction during a dead time like March would probably be a good idea, imo.

[fastbilly1]

There are two main reasons the sites goes down:
1. Hosting is fubar - the most common
2. Server runs out of RAM

When the server runs out of RAM, the admin team can reboot the site. It takes less than five minutes after we notice it (usually less than a minute). Typically this is the issue most websites run into, sadly we are not in that majority.