"
As we are a global wide wide forum it is not possible to schedule this internal maintenance at the moment nobody is using the server.
To solve most performance related problems we want to move to a 64bit platform, 8 core CPU, 64GB of ram and 2TB of drive space in a RAID 6 environment. Which is a decent server with a good price-value balance. (Still not the absolute best, but when you want to donate a better machine, please do).
During the donation drive, most of us (if not all) were suddenly confronted with the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic. For the SOH one of the immediate consequences was that the donation drive lasted much longer than expected. Many of us lost jobs or were confronted in a different way with the economic crisis caused by the pandemic.
The target of this years donation drive was only reached on the 12th of April. Which provided a green light for the planned modernization of our servers. But as you can understand the replacement of the servers currently isn't automatically the highest priority, as many have severe and urgent issues in real life which currently needs priority attention.
We also have to find out whether our plans are still executable under the current circumstances. Are the required technicians available? Can they travel? Is the planned hard-ware still available, etc. So the execution of plans might need more time than we originally anticipated.
Priller is correct that our servers were moved in the past. When my memory is still correct, this was because our previous data-centre merged with our current data-centre after which they abandoned the data-centre which housed our servers.
Last year Dave provided an overview with all the annual costs and the way our money was spent. I expect he will do the same this year once he knows how he will spend it. Please have some patience as Dave is one of the people who is hit quite hard by this crisis.
As said I understand every-bodies frustration, but we are doing our utmost to keep this outhouse running. And I ask for your understanding that people currently have other important things on their agenda.
We don't have any influence on people who think its fun to overload data-traffic or who invest in bots which 'harvest' the complete internet several times per week."
The above reply was posted from Huub in previous thread!
Nothing has changed except for the COVID19 second wave increasing the load on the net and the
volunteers who maintain this site.
.
), but doesn't bother me in the least. There's plenty of other things for me to do when I can't access the site... like sim! 
