Server move: donation drive

[valis]

I haven't asked for anything over the years. I would like to complete the server move end of month, it's currently requiring double hosting and the server that's visible still gets a few terabytes/month only to this specific domain (all other domains hosted are normal traffic). It's blocked at the firewall now, but still eats bandwidth, so hosting isn't cheap.

I still am not directly asking or requiring, but if you are able to give a bit to ease and speed up the transition, now would be the time.

And to the two people who did contribute over Christmas, no need to give again and you always have my gratitude.

Thanks

(The donation link is at the bottom of every page)

[w_ellis]

Just dropped a few pennies your way! Good luck with the server move and hope you get enough donations to cover the costs.

[valis]

Thank you w_ellis. People here have always been more than generous, I'm sure everything will go well.

[yayajohn]

Thanks Valis for all you do here.

[Gordon Gekko]

Yes, this is one of the two sites I kept looking at for all those years, thx

[valis]

Thank you everyone

[BuzzBang]

Small donation made. Thanks for keeping PlanetZ forums running all these years

[valis]

My pleasure!

[valis]

Server move has been initiated.

We are again moving upmarket to a fully managed and dedicated server (rather than a VPS as this is on now).

This will double my monthly cost, but it also means that the attacks on this site in the past (not the current spam) will face a hardened OS. To be clear the server has never been compromised, but the chances of this occuring now are far far less. This is good for us, and good for me in the long run as it means much less time to deal with manually configuring and maintaining the server. It adds about 33% to the cost, so I am considering my stance of never asking for money.

The current donation drive has been a great help, and I will start working on rebuilding my personal financial stream before doing a regular donation request. I will NOT be adding banners or any other garbage to these forums, ever.

[valis]

Server move should be complete. A database restore was performed to update the new host with the last possible moment I could grab before switching DNS over.

The overall hosting was simplified dramatically, and we are well over-provisoned here now. The hosting company was more than willing to help with a plan that served our needs, and are on a more stable (though paid) branch of rhel (redhat linux) now as well.

[sunmachine]

Thanks, valis! Everything’s working fine here so far.

[valis]

I will leave this thread up until the end of the month, and apply donations to the server hosting to give us some padding. The time saved from my personal finances will go to other maintenance tasks I have put off around here, so that by the end of the month I'm ready to get back to work.

Thanks for the support, everyone. I've been largely idle since COVID and am ready to launch again, this was a good start to that.