Upcoming outage due to change of hosting

Website is currently slow and laggy at loading. :/

[Laird]

Website is currently slow and laggy at loading. :/

I noticed that too. Thanks for confirming that it wasn't just me.

Turns out some idiot bot was rapidly requesting pages on my personal website that loaded slowly because they queried an external site (Wikipedia) multiple times, pausing between each query.

I've temporarily disabled that page, and will confirm that I've properly instructed bots to ignore it.

[Laird]

will confirm that I've properly instructed bots to ignore it.

Confirmed. I've blocked the bot by IP and reenabled the page.

Seems much faster now.

[Laird]

Are we going to do another round of funding to help manage the hosting expenses? Would be happy to contribute.

Thanks to @Max_B, who yesterday generously donated USD 63 (following on from @Michel H's generous donation of USD 20 in November), we are now well and truly set up financially for the next year, and probably even the next two years, with savings of USD 76.05. Your offer to contribute is very much appreciated, Sci, and I hope you don't feel miffed that I minimised the need for you to donate, and that then a donation was made by somebody else, minimising the need even more.

Curiously, our biggest expense by far is domain registration for our secondary domains psiencequest.com and psiencequest.org. Although all they do is redirect to our primary domain, they do seem to be useful to some people, so it's probably worth paying to maintain them.

Website is currently slow and laggy at loading. :/

I've set up a page to monitor the uptime of psiencequest.net and the other three sites hosted on the same VPS here:

https://stats.uptimerobot.com/EcTlr30TSp

Thanks to @Max_B, who yesterday generously donated USD 63 (following on from @Michel H's generous donation of USD 20 in November), we are now well and truly set up financially for the next year, and probably even the next two years, with savings of USD 76.05. Your offer to contribute is very much appreciated, Sci, and I hope you don't feel miffed that I minimised the need for you to donate, and that then a donation was made by somebody else, minimising the need even more.

Not miffed at all, thank you @Max_B & @Michel H !

Thanks to @Max_B, who yesterday

It was Sci's talk of funding that prompted me... as the internet is being monetized, monopolised, controlled and censored... it seems more important than ever to support a forum where people can talk freely about this stuff... I don't know of anywhere else on the internet that does this in this way... or has someone like @Laird who provides the time/know-how to manage the service for peanuts. Least we can do is cover the overheads.

[Laird]

I've set up a page to monitor the uptime of psiencequest.net and the other three sites hosted on the same VPS here:

https://stats.uptimerobot.com/EcTlr30TSp

We had a little bit of downtime last night (my time zone). I think I've diagnosed and resolved the problem: the package manager, dnf, seems to run automatically every now and then, and it consumes more memory than expected, causing the out-of-memory killer to be invoked to kill it after a period of congesting the system. The fix (I hope) was to add a small (1GB) swap file to handle situations in which memory requirements temporarily exceed our 2GB limit of actual RAM. Fingers crossed that our system's all stable now.

[Laird]

It was Sci's talk of funding that prompted me... as the internet is being monetized, monopolised, controlled and censored... it seems more important than ever to support a forum where people can talk freely about this stuff... I don't know of anywhere else on the internet that does this in this way... or has someone like @Laird who provides the time/know-how to manage the service for peanuts. Least we can do is cover the overheads.

Well, it's very generous of you, and I'm glad you appreciate this place as much as I do.