Welcome to Gaia! ::

Are you talking about the "lol, maintanance." message? xd

Well, it's an improvement, that's for sure.

At least it does mention that the forum almost went over its limits. XD

XD I'm not sure, but I'll take you literally here. wink It could be MUCH worse.

Extremely extended downtime (Weeks or even the rest of the month) that puts the forum out of commission entirely, punishment for going over your limit could mean increased prices (sometimes massively inflated), a handicap on usage (limiting the usage of sprites, number of posts, banners, history, etc), or I've seen a few forums who went over their resources once or twice in a row and were deleted entirely.

Depends on what the stipulations in the contract were about usage of bandwidth and whatnot.

Typically, they slap on a penalty for overage, like, say, Double the usual price for bandwidth.

If the contract they signed states, that you won't go over a certain set overage amount, say, an extra gig, they can terminate your contract and sometimes they do without telling you. (Experience unfortunately shows what CAN happen.)

Then everything is gone. They delete the account, and unless the person that owns it does backups. Well. Yeah.

I'm not trying to sound nasty here. XD I'm not even exaggerating. It's just what could happen if a forum went a bit too far beyond its resources.

Edit: Forum OR Website. XD

I've never seen one deleted out of hand for bandwidth overages.

I HAVE seen them shut down for CPU resource usage. Even then, the offending site is typically given a few days to make a backup so they can move to another server, and the host would prefer to sell the user a dedicated server than delete the account.

The cave itself is on a dedicated server. Unless the game gets so out of hand as to require a second dedicated server or enormous amounts of bandwidth, and TJ decides that's just too much expense, I don't see the game going away because of computer resources. The forum, however, is on a shared server, and it could easily be forced to move to a dedicated server to keep going.

Other reasons I've seen sites shut down suddenly: DMCA threats, content against the TOS, content that apparently offends the hosting company. I've seen pagan sites go offline abruptly with no explanation from the host, forex. Harassing lawsuits like the one that caused the temporary shutdown of Absolute Write.

I personally have had a forum entirely deleted and shutdown because we went WAY over the allotted bandwidth, and the dude who ran it was kind of a p***k. XD The forum was one of those pay a small amount a month, tiny things on a small server, a favor from a friend of a friend cut rate type of deal. We never intended to do anything excessive with it, but the project got FAR more popular than I expected and poof. He cut us off and deleted everything before we even realized what had happened. I'm fairly certain he did it out of spite. We had a contract, but he got pissed and I lost a ton of data on Mayan/Aztec rituals. neutral

I definitely can't see that happening to Dragcave. As you mentioned, that dedicated server is what would keep it going, no matter what. biggrin

I wouldn't worry too much, Quintafeira12. I think TJ took the forum down just to be on the safe side.

Yep! *cheers*