Help THR move to a faster, more reliable server.

[Oleg Volk]

From the start, The High Road expenses have been covered by the moderators, primarily by Derek Zeanah who provides the server and the connection. He can no longer do this, and the rest of us would be hard-pressed to set up a server capable of handling all the traffic securely and with enough speed.

We'd like to upgrade THR hardware to a modern server and place it at an ISP with multiple outgoing connections for improved reliability. To do this right would take almost $5,000 for the hardware and the first year of connectivity. We will contribute as much as we can towards that goal, but we can't do it on our own. Want to help?

You can contribute by Paypal ([email protected]) or by mail

"For the High Road"
Derek Zeanah
470 Country Club Road
Statesboro, GA 30458

If you want to help in some other way, just ask Derek. He will administer the new server, just not keep it at his home.

PS: We won't place "contributor" or "$" next to your user name. The perk for your help will be improved THR performance and reliablity.

Edited because MalH pointed out the new interest to me, and I'm in the process of moving...

 

[Derek Zeanah]

Update one month later

We've nearly reached our goal, and have received enough funds to go ahead with the move. If you've been planning to donate, please go ahead (it will go toward monthly hosting costs). If you've already donated, thanks for helping out.

We've already found a server (a Dell - dual-processor Xenon machine with 2 gigs of ram, 2 hot-swap SCSI drives and a hardware RAID card, and redundant power supplies) and we know who's probably going to host the server, so it's an issue of building, shipping, and testing.

Once the process is complete we will have the following advantages over the current situation:

• A home after June 30th, as I'm moving and can no longer host this out of my house.
• Faster page loads, and hopefully an elimination of those occasional unexplainable slow-load times.
• Better connectivity -- we should get better uptime, and the site has backup generators so the next Hurricane shouldn't affect us much at all.
• Better worst-case scenarios, as I'll be hosting some personal machines in tandem that can step in if something unexpected happens.

We're not ready to switch over for the while, but when we finally make the move it should be painless from a user perspective (other than down-time to upload the most recent database to the server). We'll post updates when something major is about to change.

Thanks for the support, guys. We couldn't have done it without member donations.