Most of the time, site administration runs smoothly here. I check email alerts, clean out the spam account signups, check the dashboard for failed logins — that sort of thing.

Aaaand then some of the time, it doesn’t. Not at all. That few minutes of morning routine turns into hours, and then days, of back and forth with tech support from multiple providers.

Back in June, SDA began puking up bad connections and resource limit warnings. Our traffic stats crashed and then froze.  The hosting company diagnosed “ai bot traffic” and recommended Cloudflare to take the load off the server.

You know about Cloudflare — it’s a big tech expert company that measures your humanity.

So, upon the advice of experts I purchased a Cloudflare plan. This immediately broke the site good and hard.

Dealing with Cloudflare support required a heroic act of restraint on my part when, after days of failed fixes, the ticket was elevated, and a higher level tech arrived to “take over the case”.

I thanked him, before reminding Mr. Al-High Level it had been his case all along and closing the account.

To cut a long and ridiculous story short, our newish hosting company (they inherited SDA when they bought out Hosting Matters) then thought to check our traffic stats.

“Oh”.

They had “inherited” a site that served 5.7M visits and pushed 1.19 TB of bandwidth since January. Well, that was new information! This resulted in a phone meeting with the host company’s owner and tech team, real people, for which I am genuinely grateful.

So, now we have a higher $$ plan. It’s not a heavy lift financially, but it does double the hosting fees we enjoyed for nearly two decades. That, combined with the security plan renewal, means that it’s fundraising time again.

We only do this once a year, and you all contribute far more than required to cover our costs, for which I’m also grateful. As I wrote last year at this time, “The business model of SDA has always been “this blog runs on the volunteer effort of people who enjoy yelling at radios, but your donations are appreciated”.

The funds raised over and above those costs are divided among myself and the guest bloggers. Etransfer is the preferred method, but there’s a link to a Paypal address on the sidebar as well.

*** If you’ve recently donated or contribute monthly, please ignore this – you’ve done your part!  If you’re not in a financial position to contribute, please don’t and don’t apologize for it. ***

Finally, a reminder about SDA account creation: If, in the interests of commenting privacy you create a username and/or email address with properties common to spammers, I’m going to nuke it.  So, if I’ve deleted your account in error, drop me an email and we’ll get you fixed up.