The OS/2 Museum site has now moved to a completely different hosting setup (a VPS). There could well be various quirks caused by the move, although for the most part moving the WordPress setup went surprisingly (for me at least) smoothly.
The OS/2 Museum lasted 9 years on shared hosting. But it was no longer adequate, simply because at times the levels of legitimate traffic (to say nothing of spammers, bots, and other nuisances) were too high with no sensible way to control them.
We’ll see how long the new approach will last before something breaks again. Fingers crossed.
Do you take donations or anything to keep the site running?
It’s excellent reading and the net would a valuable resource if it died…
No, though I’ve been thinking about it.
The problem is really time more than money; managing the site takes time, which is limited and prevents me from writing content. I’d give it a few months to see how the new hosting solution works out.
Pleasantly surprised my RSS reader works again, thank you!
I’d also be willing to donate, with no additional expectations than keeping the site and its existing content reachable. The work you have put into the OS/2 Museum already is well enough justification, and I don’t think any kind of pressure would make the site better.
> The problem is really time more than money; managing the site takes time, which is limited and prevents me from writing content.
This right here. I’m on a shared service again as the DDoS and wget crazies, rss bombers and numerous search engines were just dragging it down. Hosting can be a full time job, but even 10 years later of that 2 week outage on blogspot makes me all the more nervous to be on someone’s platform. Backup frequently and often and test those backups! Thankfully virtual machines are cheap.
I may move back to a physical machine I rent. I put ESXi on it, and it’s a lot more responsive than kvm was on it.
Last month I had 1,902 unique user hits, 1,021,160 page hits and 100gb of traffic. I know the uniques filters out bots, but it’s kind of neat knowing I hit the 1 million pages a month mark. I am guessing that you are getting a lot more traffic
It seems that RSS feeds are still broken.
Last on the articles (http://www.os2museum.com/wp/feed/) is ‘Why Does Windows Really Use Backslash as Path Separator? / Sun, 26 May 2019’ and on the comments (http://www.os2museum.com/wp/comments/feed/) is ‘Comment on Windows 3.0 DR 1.14, February 1989 by Yuhong Bao / Sat, 20 Apr 2019’.
Is it any better now? There were some stale cached files, will have to see if things still go out of sync or not.
Yes, all posts are up, a dozen or so most recent comments also appeared. Thanks.
Side track:
It is idiotic if RSS fetches causes any more load than fetching a small static file.
I wouldn’t be surprised though if WP actually does some database query and builds an answer for each individual request, even though it’s most likely that the number of RSS request outnumbers the number of times the database is actually updated. If this is the case, it would be nice if there were some patch for WP that would generate pre-made static RSS answers everytime someone posts a comment or a new article.
A solution for this would be to use some kind of caching proxy like Varnish and set it to force caching stuff for at least some short period of time even if WP says it shouldn’t be cached. That way there would be a short delay before stuff ends up in the RSS feeds, but the load on WP would be reduced.
It seems that the articles feed is stuck again, last item is ‘The Cape Cod Disaster’ / Mon, 16 Dec 2019
Grr, I have no idea why. The comment feed is working fine (updated today). It should be uptodate now, though I wish I knew what actually did the trick…
The RSS feed got stuck again, and again(?) it was only the article feed, not comment feed. Clearing the cache brought it back, at least for now.