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A little technical background on the BSB:

Several years ago, circa 2005, Ron had a friend hosting the BSB from his house, but unreliable Internet and computer issues caused an unstable environment. I got the forum database and other files from Ron and was able to re-launch it on a scavenged pc/server out of my house. There was an improvement in availability of the forum, but it still wasn't an ideal situation as I lived out in the country and got marginal-at-best Internet from a phone company that had just started their Internet offering.

I was able to move the server up to my office and host from there, which solved the Internet performance issues. A couple of years later, with the help of a friend at work, we were able to move the BSB from the old server to a virtual computer with high performance disks. This allowed us to add disk space and any processing power or memory that we needed as the forum grew. However, I couldn't afford to upgrade the operating system or database software that ran under the forum software due to cost. It would have cost a couple thousand dollars or so. And so, the forum was stuck on a very old version of the software for a long time. The upside of the situation is that, barring a couple of times where I accidentally paid the domain renewal late or the virtual server crashed because of running out of space or whatever, the forum was running on some of the best equipment money can buy. We had fault tolerance, high grade firewalls, amazing Internet, frequent backups - stuff that costs a lot of money we got to use for free.

When security and rules surrounding the kinds of things we could have on our network tightened considerably over the past couple of years, Ron and I had discussed that the day would be coming when the forum would need to be moved again. Then, a few weeks ago, the friend that had been helping keep the forum alive left to work for another company. Almost comically, within an hour of his departure, the age of the operating system and db server software finally caught up with us. A critical vulnerability was revealed in a sweeping security scan, and it became too risky to keep it on the network any longer. So, at that point, it became a pretty easy decision between trying to buy new equipment and find someone's house to place the server in, or moving to the Webwiz hosting services.

Now, we don't have to worry about supplying the underlying equipment and software, Internet connection, backups, antivirus and security software, or the responsibility of upgrading the database and forum software frequently, etc. We pay a very reasonable hosting fee and these things are handled for us.

Anyway, I know that was a wall of boring info to take in, but I just wanted to give some insight on how and why we got from A to B, and why B is a good place for us to "B" (sorry, couldn't resist).

Take care,

Rusty