EHM The Blue Line

The Blue Line is planning to move to a new server tomorrow (i.e. on Monday 3 January 2010). As a result, the site will be inaccessible for some time. We expect that it will be down for approximately two hours. Obviously it may take longer if there are any technical issues/complications encountered. I will try to keep users updated of any complications via this thread at the SI Forum: http://community.sigames.com/showthread ... ost6338860

As some of the older users may be aware, TBL is currently hosted on Octavian's account with EuroHost. Octavian is a former moderator of TBL and co-founded the site along with Archibalduk. Over the past six and a half years Octavian has very generously allowed TBL to continue to be hosted on his account free of charge. Octavian has paid for all costs associated with hosting the site.

Over the past year, TBL's traffic has risen sharply. Our monthly bandwidth has doubled from approximately 29gb to 60gb per month. This volume of traffic is putting a great strain on the server. TBL now uses 60% of the server's total resources. This is resulting in server crashes (many of you may have occasionally had difficulty accessing the site over the past few months) and is taking up all of the bandwidth from Octavian's web sites (such as his very popular AceMasters site). This is clearly unfair on Octavian.

Therefore TBL needs to move to its own server. Even though Octavian does not have as much involvement with TBL these days, he still shares our strong belief that the TBL and EHM community must continue for as long as there is interest:

Octavian wrote:Since TBL is a community project and our priority was, is and will be, not to have any money or advertisements involved, I will continue to support it: TBL never dies! The site is also thriving and more alive than ever, which is great.

Not only this, but Octavian has offered to fund the new sever. This is incredible news and ensures that TBL will continue to run for as long as possible. However, it does not seem quite right that Octavian should have to pay all of the costs. I feel it is only right that I also make an annual contribution to the running costs.

In the future I will be providing a link to Octavian's PayPal account so that any user may make a contribution if they want to. This is entirely discretionary and will not result in any additional benefits for any user - it'll just help fund the running costs of the site. If TBL were to one day shut down then any donated money not spent on running costs will be donated to a charity. TBL will continue to run not for profit.

Finally, I just want to say a big thank you to Octavian. He has been so supportive of TBL over the past six years and continues to do so. Without him then TBL would not be where it is today - in fact we may never have existed.

And we have moved!

The downtime was very short, however we lost the few posts/changes that were made this morning (EU time) between the backup of the database and the dns propagation. Sorry for that, but hey, let's enjoy our new server (home).

The move went quite well since we moved from Brussels, Belgium to California, USA in less than one hour! Who could do that without the Internet . If you encounter strange things feel free to send me a PM!

Happy TBL browsing!

Thank you so much, Octavian! Your contribution to this community is immense!

I totally think it's appropriate that we offer up donations towards the funding of the site's costs. The fact that this site was able to run for so long without that is amazing. I'm sure if we all help in whatever way we can, even a little bit, it will add up and make a difference.

Thanks Octavian!

However, it seems posts are missing again. I wrote earlier today(but after the move was completed) and that post is no longer there

Thanks Octy!

Manimal wrote:Thanks Octavian!

However, it seems posts are missing again. I wrote earlier today(but after the move was completed) and that post is no longer there

Yeah, I didn't move the albums folder. Will do that when I'm back home this evening!

Octavian wrote:

Manimal wrote:Thanks Octavian!

However, it seems posts are missing again. I wrote earlier today(but after the move was completed) and that post is no longer there

Yeah, I didn't move the albums folder. Will do that when I'm back home this evening!

Albums folder?

And for Octavian's honor, we just started the Atlanta Thrashers challenge

Thank you for fast moving That PayPal account would come handy

Albums folder are albums that users can store their images in. There used to be link from user profile but now I can't find it, after site re-design
Also, there used to be "latest image" in the lower right corner of TBL homepage (before re-design). Archi, how can one enter those albums? I'm sure CatchUp or Getzlaf15 had in their albums many of avatars and logos they had made. Or am I missing something?

The albums folder and its contents were included with the move - hence I was wondering why Octavian was referring to it.

That's right - the album feature was disabled some time ago (and finally removed in last summer's site upgrade - it was taking up too much space and sites such as Photobucket are much better for sharing images). All of the images are still on the server though - so nothing is lost.