So, my hosting got cancelled yesterday…

Welcome all to a new era!  Yesterday, the hosting for my website was cancelled.  Can’t you tell?  No?  Well that is because I have shifted the hosting of the site to a much more personal hosting service.  I have been working tirelessly to research all sorts of solutions to keep the site up and running.  I have had people contact me through various streams telling me that it would be a big loss.  Thank you to all of those people.  Apologies for the second non-RPG-specific post, but I want to explain where we are at.

So, where are you at?

I am so glad you asked.  I chatted to a couple of my go-to tech-head friends and they came up with a couple of options.  The first of these were virtual machine/server providers, although I thought I had done most of these.  Five days ago I was trying to work out if I could get my hands on a physical server and host the site myself.  But one of my friends talked to me about a virtual server/machine provider I had not heard of.  When I went and looked at the site I found they were handing out $250 credit to trial the service and see how you go.

So that is where we are at.  I spent the past three to four days backing up the site and working how to migrate it.  I then migrated it, and sent other bits in the background to other providers.  I then started the process of turning things over to the virtual server and making sure it was secure.  Some of you may have noticed the site being down.  Some of you may have noticed the site warning about not being secure.  In fact, a variety of things happened over the past four to five days on the site.  But it is active.

This saved it from being cancelled!

Well, yes.  For now.  I am now in an evaluation period to see if the site can continue in the current format.  I will be looking at the costing and performance over the next two to three months to see what the circumstances are going to be moving forward.  I have also now managed to get my hands on a server that I could set up the hosting on, if this falls through.  But even then, that will be evaluated if we move to it.  There are a lot of personal overheads for me running things this way, and that is what I need to consider as well.

The site is not at 100% yet and I will need to do a little bit more work to get it there.  But past that is where more work will be involved.  Simply speaking, the site cannot support itself with ads.  They certainly help, but it takes time to get a pay out.  I will be looking at other methods of revenue raising moving forward.  There will likely be a Patreon.  There may even be material that I develop towards a Kickstarter.

It is time to celebrate though.

I want to thank you, my readers, for caring enough about this site to contact me and ask how you can help.  Even if you didn’t, but thought to yourself that you would miss the site, thank you.  I can now move forward with the content I had planned.  I can also branch out a little and start reviewing alternative games again.  Just a big thanks to all that read this and keep me motivated.  Keep on rolling!