This has been a tough month. Not only for the world, but for our forum also. Our previous server host passed away unbeknown to us, and the rest of his company seemed to have been neglected, picked apart and abandoned by those around him, leaving us (and many others) with an intermittent, unreliable service, no supprt, and no easy way to get stuff backed up, moved or cancelled.
We thankfully did not sit on our hands, and with a bit of effort, teamwork, and some help, we managed to do an incredible trick and got the entire contents of our server, including our host name, moved to a new, better host. And instead of the week and a half we budgeted for doing it in, we did it in an emergency, and got it done in 24 hours. Most of the credit for this goes to SAS's co-owner, SAS~Storbror, who not only managed the integration with the new host, but, years ago, set in place some unobtrusive devices that ensured we could grab a fresh backup of our database that was only minutes old, even though the server itself was down and unreachable.
We had planned to do this move in this week during nighttime for Europe, and to give members at least a two day heads up. We started preparing for it last week, and when Saturday came and the lights went out on the old server, we took it as a sign from the gods, and just put all the schedules into overdrive. The results is that you can read this now, here
I was supposed to update the donations on Sunday, but that was not possible, so without further delay, here it is: We received a number of donations towards the regular maintenance of the forum over the last month. The guys who contributed were:
David Prosser
SAS~Storebror (this one was done before the "troubles". There was another massive donation by the SAS forum owners later, which I will discuss more below)
macgiver
mdripley
IKolincak
Airbourne
wern moldy
Thank you gents, as always, you are what makes it possible for this forum to live and survive. We owe you a beer!
Cheers!
Regarding the financial losses brought about by the server move: We did take a bit of a hit, to the tune of several hundred dollars which was pre paid to the old host. Even though we have requested a refund, we are not expecting one, and are expecting the request itself to be as ignored as previous tech support tickets were. We are not alone in this, dozens of other clients of theirs are in the same boat.
However, not only was this loss immediately made good by the two owners of this forum, but besides that, we had enough reserves saved up to cover it, and to still ensure the forums finances, until the month our donations record shows we are good to go to till (Aug 2021 before updating this month's donations). We have been very careful with all the donation money we ever got, and so it are times like these where that pays off.
We have though, considered making a special "Xmas" donations month, as a 13th month target, to just ease back some of that reserve cushion. Since we are covered for almost a year into the future, it seems like a not-bad idea, so that is what we will do. The above donations will be reflected as per usual, but we will add a "Xmas 13th 2020 to the list above that. (or somehow, I'll figure it out in a sec lol)
S!
