Up to this point, the photo portal has been hosted off the dedicated server of a friend who offered the use of his server many years ago. This same server hosts numerous sites that I run and has never caused a problem for the server due to bandwidth consumption or anything else for that matter. Yesterday, another user of the server who is a good friend of mine told me that he could not access his sites and instead was seeing the page that you all have been seeing. I talked to the admin today and was told that he decided to terminate both our accounts for no apparent reason. This is the reason for the strange page. This action brought down both the photo portal and several community service sites related to the local 4-H spacecamp (what else
). As I said earlier, the portal is not gone forever. I am currently backing up all pictures and albums stored on the server so that they will not be lost when my account is fully deleted. I am ordering a server which will happily host the portal for years to come. The server will run off my home broadband connection which, while much slower than the mutiple fiber optic links on the old machine, is more than adequate for the needs as I am one of the few people in this area with broadband making for a rather fast connection.
There are several things that you will notice about the site once it returns:
1) At peak usage, the machine may seem less responsive due to the slower connection. This is not expected to be a problem for the way the site is used.
2) While I have been able to recover all photos and the album structure, it is
HIGHLY LIKELY that all passswords, photo captions, comments, and any custom album names (where the album showed a name different than the directory) will be lost. I will put the photos back up as they were organized by you and will send you a new temporary password by PM.
3)There will be more space to store photos! The server I am ordering has a hard drive that is 4 times bigger than the current machine, plus it will be holding less "stuff".
4) Expect additional features to be added to the site once I have the current portal back up and running. This will not be immediate as I have to get several sites moved over to the machine before I can play.
That's all I have for now... Please watch this thread for updates as I have them!
