Long story short: Dreamhost changed their hosting policies and we no longer have sudo access to the server. This means we can't edit the httpd.conf file and are restricted in the services we can run.
What this means for the users is the next time the site goes down, we may have an extended down time due to not being able to bring the site back up. Dreamhost has no solution for this other than to switch to a service that costs about 10x as much as what I'm paying now.
I'm currently looking into a different hosting solution or possible alternatives on dreamhost, but we may need to change providers in the near future.
Please keep in mind that if the site goes down, you can still post to the yukkuri fanfic google group site, which is what we've used in the past to communicate with everyone.
Basically, as far as the httpd.conf goes, this site is hosted on a VPS, which means that several (like ten) other entities use it for their own site. If any one of those ten entities makes some change to their web server in their Dreamhost dashboard, it will re-write the httpd.conf file, and take this site down. (That is probably the #1 reason for downtime in the past, #2 being server restarts.)
Wait, so other people making changes to their own site can crash OYP? That's dumb.
I could also spare a few bucks to help OYP stay up, if it comes to that. I've been here every day for three years now sweet Shinki I have no life so I owe you guys at least that much.
That's shared hosting... Combined with some rather unusual (to most vanilla sites) redirects in the httpd.conf file (stuff like "if they're asking for an image, just give it to them, don't run it through RoR, which is what it was doing for the first several months, making the site really slow and resource heavy).
This is way off-topic, but would that sort of thing explain why a page of thumbnails loads much faster on OYP than, say, Danbooru? Or is that just because we get a lot less traffic?
ukshadow said: poweryoga, why not set a small donation box or something? Maybe some users here could chip in for a better service if things look too grim?
ukshadow said: poweryoga, why not set a small donation box or something? Maybe some users here could chip in for a better service if things look too grim?
If you're setting up a donation box, would you also accept any cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin or Dogecoin?