I'm sorry but that does rather miss the real point. The vast majority of internet resources don't go down and vanish, then reappear sometime later.
The problem here is absolutely the 68Kmla admin/owners, because it's their choice of how, who and why the site is hosted. In the 3-4 years of TD, how many times/days/hours has it been offline by comparison? Pretty much none.
It's not 'the host' that dropped the ball, it's the people who placed reliance on that particular host. They had better options (very clearly) but didn't choose them.
Shame that the people who run that site seem not to have such a regard for the value of the resource that you (and I) do.
I think it takes some real acrobatics to twist the host not doing their job around to still blame the admins. 68k staff certainly isn't perfect, I'll be the first to say that (see page 2 of this thread), but blaming them for this problem is quite unfair. They HAVE switched hosts multiple times in the past few years to try to fix these problems, and it seems they have just been extremely unlucky. I'm going to paste below a message I wrote last night on a similar thread on the VCF Forums:
They've had terrible luck with their web hosting. Here's a summary of "what's gone wrong the past few years on 68kMLA":
July 2021: A creeping corruption bug in their software stack caused months of posts to hover about in RAM instead of being committed to disk, along with a maintenance task that was deleting data over time. When the corrupt task finally crashed the database server, it was too late and posts between February and July 2021 were lost, as the backups being taken were also affected by this corruption bug. This led to the forum migrating from Invision Community to XenForo.
July 2023: At this time, they were using a database-as-a-service product from one of the leading hosting companies. Due to an issue with the host, the database server crashed, but due to the host not doing their job, they were unable to quickly restore from a backup, and instead had to manually export and reimport the instance, which made it take a good while to get the site back up. They were understandably pissed about this and they switched around their hosting arrangement following.
April 2024: Another couple day outage caused by an unspecified technical error at the host.
November 2024: Forum stops sending email, which remained broken for
7 months. This one's totally on the administration for not fixing sooner.
October 2025: Forum was down for three days because the server motherboard kicked the bucket, following which the host took their sweet time to get things going again. While this issue was out of the administration's control, they failed to make any announcement about why/that the forum was down until after it had been restored. This had followed months of inactivity from the staff team, which understandably worried people.
And most recently, the March 2026 outage: Seems like the host plain and simply fumbled the bag once again and misconfigured the network settings. Apparantly the problem was that the host stopped announcing the site's IP space, a simple issue which they took four whole days to solve, with 68kmla staff spending 20 hours with the support team trying to get the damn site back online... Safe to say that their current hosting provider does not seem very competent.
As for what provider they are using, they were on Linode a year or two ago, I think they might have switched to something different more recently? Not sure. But in spite of what it seems, it really doesn't look like they're hosting the site on garbage hardware. It just looks like they've gotten horribly unlucky.
I'm not writing all this out to say that I love the way the forum is run. The administration there has gone through periods of inactivity, and often did a poor job communicating with the community about site issues (although this has gotten better recently). I just want to give them a break about the idea that their personal incompetence is the reason why the site has an unusually high number of outages. It's pretty much always been the fault of their hosting providers, which I will again mention that they have changed through multiple times in the past decade in an attempt at solving this problem. I'm not at all worried that the site's going to go down and stay down.
