Bottom line is that this site is essentially a free service that is provided at a certain cost to the admins of the site. Bandwidth isn't free just yet, though it's not like back in the day where you'd get in trouble on Fidonet for having more characters in a message than absolutley necessary
My whole point was if you aren't a paying or donating member to the site you really don't have a right to complain when stuff isn't 100% up and running. In the real world tech support and server admin isn't free. There are companies out there who pay literally billions of dollars for support contracts and not one of them guarentees 100% uptime. It simply doesn't happen.
I'm sure the admins could have fixed the problem more quickly than it was but it likely would have required taking the site down and rebuilding it from the ground up to find the problem. Obviously not an option that anyone would have liked but it would have had the problem fixed more quickly.
I don't have a photohosting account, I have my own server with more space than i'll ever need to host my pics myself. My donations were for a T-shirt in part and just some $$ to help out the site for the rest. I use the site, I like the site so I choose to help support it.
For me one of the biggest drawbacks to the internet in general is the idea that everything should be 'free'. It takes time, money and specialized knowledge to set up a site like this and to keep it running with any semblance of reliability and that's something that a lot of people just don't seem to grasp these days.
A couple of days of downtime isn't really all that long. Without taking the whole site down and dissecting it from the ground up it can take a lot of time to troubleshoot problems like the recent issues with the galleries, that's a simple fact of life with computers. Sometimes they do stuff they aren't supposed to and it takes time to fix.
Now if we were talking about months instead of days yeah, then you have a reason to bitch
But let's cut the admins some slack. In Canada at any rate Network admins and Server admins are a lot higher on the food chain than I am (I work in IT just in case it wasn't obvious to anyone
) and they get paid a LOT more than I do... and I can tell you right now that it's doubtful that every donation this site has ever received could pay for me for a year.... nevermind an actual Server administrator.
I guess what i'm trying to say is you get what you pay for. If we all paid $19.95 a month for a ssnakess subscription i'm sure Jeff could afford to quit his day job and have backup servers and guarentee uptimes and problems like the recent gallery issue would be handled in minutes or hours instead of days but the simple fact is that the vast majority of us haven't paid a dime to the site and as such really don't have any reason to complain when stuff doesn't work for a short period of time.
Boidkeeper, I do understand your point as well, but let's be reasonable here. You paid $20 for a year of hosting if i'm correct? So the 2-3 days the galleries were down works out to about $0.12 - $0.18 of lost money. Just to put things in perspective. Now if you were losing hundreds, thousands or millions of dollars in business every day the galleries were down that would be a whole other issue but at that point you'd be paying a lot more than $20/year for the service in the first place. Or at least you should be if it's worth that much to you.
I used to do IT support for the phone company here and we'd get people all the time running online businesses on residential ADSL (which in itself is a violation of your end user licence agreement) and they would absolutely FLIP if there was ever ANY downtime on their $24.95/month connection. They would claim to be losing hundreds or thousands of dollars a day in lost business to which we would always wonder.. "If your internet connection is THAT vital to your business why are you using the cheapest possible connection instead of what you should be using?" Which for the record is a managed connection with a dedicated tech support guy 24/7 but the same line costs about $250/month to have. Even then they only have a 97% uptime guarentee. Which means that your connection could be down for a total of roughly 9 DAYS in a calendar year.
The whole point of this, now that I look back, ranty little post is that you do get what you pay for. Free isn't always the great deal it looks out to be at first and cheap isn't much better than free
Overall I think the admins and mods do a fantastic job of keeping this place up and running and I for one applaud their efforts.
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