Topic: WXforum.net outage - 25 - 31 December, 2019 .. we're back now.

[OldAlaskaGuy]

Happy to send a few shekles your way for the "cause". Thank you for all your effort.

[Jasiu / JJ]

Happy to send a few shekles your way for the "cause". Thank you for all your effort.

Anyone who wishes to chip in to help Ken defray the costs of all he does to us can click on the "Donate" button (takes you to PayPal) at https://saratoga-weather.org/wxtemplates/

[galfert]

I was just about to make the same suggestion to set up a donation link. I think this link should be right on the home page of the forum. We all benefit from this forum. We all get a lot of benefit from Ken's hard work (and time!) and he shouldn't have to also foot the bill by himself. I'm glad to not see this forum plastered with banner ads as many other Internet forums do.

Let's get donation link right on the home page. I think the donation link could have a nice quote below it. "banner ad free since 2006, thank you for your donation"

[saratogaWX]

Ok, I've taken the Donation link out of the rotating News and added a link under the News in the header for the site.

THANKS to the folks who have already donated!

[Jasiu / JJ]

Anyone who wishes to chip in to help Ken defray the costs of all he does to us

That was obviously supposed to be "of all he does FOR us" but it's pretty funny as is so I won't edit it! 

[saratogaWX]

Anyone who wishes to chip in to help Ken defray the costs of all he does to us

That was obviously supposed to be "of all he does FOR us" but it's pretty funny as is so I won't edit it! 

I think both FOR  and TO  is appropriate .. thanks for the laughs.    

[godfatherb]

Donation made. Your scripts along with several others which I modifed some for Wordpress have been a Godsend. Thanks.
http://weatherwx.net

[SoMDWx]

Ken,
 Echoing all before, thank you for all that you do and have done!  I would strongly encourage you to move to a business hosting site such as ICDSoft to host WxForum.. I have used them for at least 10+ years with outstanding support (when needed). Their packages are extremely competitive and 24/7 support is unmatched....

Jim

[saratogaWX]

Things have now settled after our long outage and the recovery.  As soon as we came up, a daily backup of the database was implemented and has been running flawlessly -- the most we'd loose would be one day of data if the DB server crashes again.  As I said in the outage log, I moved the database to a newer mySQL 5.5 instance on a different ionos server .. we're still on shared hosting, so still vulnerable to the vagaries of 3rd level support during mySQL connection issues.

With the SMF 2.0.17 update, some of the plugins started throwing massive Notice/Deprecated errors in the error log (which temporarily overfilled the mySQL server size limit of 1024Mb.  Some whacking through some of the plugins to suppress those errata was needed and overnight, the error log was barely populated.  Whew. 

I'm letting the forum just hum along (while minding the error log) for the next couple of weeks.   Thanks to the extraordinary number of donations made in the last 3 days (THANKS to all who contributed), I will be preparing a Virtual Private Server instance to migrate the forum (and northamericanweather.net) to hosting that can be fully controlled (A CentOS7/Plesk 18 instance) that will run a mySQL server on the same virtual host.
I'll keep you informed about the progress of that via the Bulletin area.

Best regards,
Ken