Over the last year, the site disk storage requirements have been getting closer to the limits of our current hosting provider. We have had the current provider for over three years, so it was time to evaluate competitors anyway. I ended up findng one that offers a lot more storage at a much lower price along with better performance, so it’s moving time.
With moving, I did some behind the scenes clean up, and decided to make one change: the new server will only support HTTPS, encrypting all traffic. All existing links will still work, but will automatically redirect you from http to https. The only difference you should notice besides an extra “s” in URLs is that the site will now be considered secure by your browser and you will not get annoying messages warning you to not enter your password on newer browsers.
I will most likely make the move this evening (Friday, January 4), meaning a few hours of downtime.
So I have not been very diligent about documenting the site finances, but then again we no longer have expense or donations as large as the first few years.
Moving forward with a new hosting provider, the ongoing costs will be lower: $35/year for hosting $26/year for domain registration (estimate, pre-paid through 2021) $12/year for backup storage (approximate) == $73/year total
This site is hosted on a Virtual Private Server from OpenVirtuals, using their SSD-Combo Professional plan. I am the only one who has access to the OpenVirtuals account.
The virtual server runs Debian Linux (currently Debian 8 - Jessie). I am the only one who can log into the server. The virtual server is only used for lifeinbklyn.
The http server is Apache2, and the database server is MySQL.
Backups are taken nightly, stored on Amazon Web Services S3, and can only be accessed by me.
There is a bug where some people cannot see pics in private groups.
As a short-term work, around, access the site via lifeinbklyn.com (no www, with a y).
I will fix this in the next week.
I am also thinking about making it so that whatever url you access the site as, you will automatically get redirected to lifeinbklyn.com This will fix issues with having to log in again when accessing links with a different url name, while still keeping the security session system used by the site intact.
A couple of debates are going on, and I think it makes sense to have one place to discuss that's not buried in various OT threads.
Right now, the public groups, including this one and the OT can be read by anyone on the internet, and are included in search engines such as Google. Public groups are managed by site admins/editors, and new posts can only be bade by site authors.
Private groups cannot be seen by people who are not members, which also means that they cannot be seen by people not logged in or search engines.
I see several options when it comes to "privacy" (Note: I put privacy in quotes because the policy of the site is still to let anyone join who is not an obvious spammer or has previously been banned). - Keep things as is. - Create a new type of public group that can only be seen by logged in members. - Make it so all public groups can only be seen by logged in members. - Something else????
