theemptyvessel wrote:

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If it is a financial issue I would chip in if there was an option to donate, I get a lot from this site and would be happy to give back.

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Yes, likewise.

This happened while I was out for a few hours so I was getting tweets about it but it wasn't easy to check what was going on.

I didn't think we could really have gone over the monthly bandwidth limit, simply because it zeroises on the 16th of each month (so we are only just over halfway through the current month) and, not surprisingly, bandwidth usage still hasn't reached the peaks that used to occur in the months when I was running the BOTB competitions on the site too.

It turned out that the real reason was that the premium subscription to Webs expired today, so the monthly bandwidth allowance suddenly dropped by 98% from 25 GB to 500MB and the total storage by 90% from 1 GB to 100 MB, both of which we were already way over this month.

It is supposed to renew automatically but I lost my credit cards last April and they were replaced with cards with new numbers, so no doubt automatic renewal failed. They have probably sent a few reminder emails but it turns out that the email address registered on the site is still Sheddie's and either it's one he doesn't check any more or he ignored the emails, assuming I knew what was going on and was taking care of it.

I've now renewed the subscription for another two years and changed the registered email address to one of mine so that I get the notifications in future. However, I'm not sure whether the original email address has to authorise the change, so I might have to try to get hold of Sheddie (if anyone has up to date contact details for him, please pm me) to ask him to check the relevant email account and to make sure he doesn't have a problem with me amending the address. I've also diaried to check in February 2018 that the automatic renewal will go through next time.

Webs has 4 subscription levels - Free (i.e. the 500 MB bandwidth/100 MB storage it defaulted to today, with ads), Starter (5 GB/400 MB, the one I originally subscribed to a few years ago until BOTB took us over those limits - even without BOTB, those limits would be too low now), Enhanced (25 GB/1 GB - the one I've been using for the last few years and have renewed today) and Pro (100 GB/5 GB)

If we ever got to the levels where we needed to upgrade to Pro, it would make more sense to move the domain to a new webspace provider, but at the current rate of hits on the site, we use up to 10 GB of bandwidth per month at the moment and just over half the 1 GB of storage is currently filled with more than 8 years worth of GB top 25 tables, etc, so hopefully the Enhanced limits will remain enough for quite a few years to come!

Finally, some of you may remember that at one point we lost the britishtennis.net domain name for a while (again because a reminder had gone to an email account that was no longer being checked, I seem to remember) and I had to fight off someone else in an auction to get it back, though fortunately the other person gave up before the cost got very high! Today's issue was a completely separate one (and only required the subscription to be paid to get things working again) - the domain name is registered with GoDaddy.com until February 2017 and I've diaried that too as well as registering to get reminder emails.

And how much does all this personally cost you on our behalf , Stephen?