Extreme Overclocking - the site I’ve always used for tracking mine and TPR’s F@H stats - is giving up on the paid server. Here’s today’s announcement:
It is with a heavy heart that I’m making this post. It’s taken me all day to try and write this, I can’t believe I’m getting so emotional. Back around March of 2000 I created EXTREME Overclocking, and not long after some of us in the forums got involved in Folding@Home. I originally started tinkering with making some folding stats in 2003. While I never managed to build out all the features I wanted (life always seems to get in the way), the site and scripts have been pretty darn reliable if I do say so. But as with everything I guess, trends change, people change, everything changes. I stopped messing with EOC many years ago but always kept the folding stats going because of the public interest and over time I kind of ended up being the proverbial last stats site running. I told myself as long as the ad revenue covered the hosting cost then I would just keep it going.
Unfortunately these days so much traffic is just bots, and Google AdSense dwindled down to so little last year that I’ve been paying a considerable portion out of pocket each month for the server hosting. I’ve been unemployed for quite some time now and I simply can’t justify the continued non-essential expense. I considered just turning the server off and calling it quits, but I couldn’t do that to you guys, for however few might still actually visit the site. So instead I’m going to be transitioning the stats to my little home server which even though it too is extremely old, should hopefully still be able to handle the load and traffic. But if / when that old machine dies, I don’t know I guess we will cross that bridge when we get there.
I don’t know if I’m going to mess with any other portions of the site since they are so outdated, or have it all just redirect here to the stats. I know at minimum I will probably pull the plug on the forums, they have been a ghost town for quite some time and it would just be more of a hassle than it’s worth to try and get working. I always hate to see old sites disappear, it feels like losing pieces of history.
So that’s the plan, move the folding stats and bare essentials of other portions of the site to my home server and see how long it runs on that. Just thought I would let everyone know beforehand, in case things go fubar.
