Thanks...Thought I read somewhere that it had moved...but the latest links I have no longer function...any info appreciated...;)

Found something here... https://github.com/Gibberlings3/Tweaks-Anthology Has everything moved to GitHub?

They haven't moved. G3 and SHS are always going down. They've been down for some days now, but Kaeloree (one of the admins) said they're on it, whatever that means.

How come these sites are so incredibly unstable? It's baffling in this day and age. Does their host suck major balls or something? For such old games, and despite hosting many files, I kind of doubt the traffic is immense, so it should be fairly cheap and straightforward with a proper host, that is a great deal more stable. Or whatever else is causing these constant issues.

I don't know for certain, but I'm guessing (and it *is* a guess) that it has something to do with domain registration. As you say, it can't possibly be a traffic problem, and I can think of no reason why such sites would ever come under (DDoS) attack. That doesn't leave many other reasons, does it?

Edit: This Facebook note about the current situation appears to confirm my suspicion:
"Hello all. G3 and SHS are currently experiencing some server downtime. We're aware of the issue and it's being worked on."
Well, they're 'aware of the issue', so it's not maintenance, and servers don't take breaks; don't have holidays. Unless they're running from a shoebox in a cellar, what else could it be but domain issues?

I don't know why you speculate about the domain name — anyone can do a whois and see that it's still registered.

Servers do take breaks... when stuff breaks down.

And yes, the traffic is pretty significant, so the hosting costs were high. Unbelievably so, if you remember last SHS' fundraiser.

So... do you have some insight maybe? Tell us, why are they down?

I don't, but if I had to guess it'd be that one of the disks failed.

... disks failing.

Given how often this happens and that they're down for days on end every time, they really ought to think about changing host -- unless it's a problem on their own end of some type. Hosting is pretty darn cheap these days, and sites generally don't go down -- ever.

Maybe they are hosting it themselves, with not good enough equipment / security?

Public domains are independent of the web hosting servers.

It's on a shared host, managed by a retired modder, but I don't know if this is a home setup or something else. I can't find the last fundraiser info though, so can't give any figures.

It was an hard drive failure. They are restoring from backups. G3's backup is current, SHS' apparently is from April, so the last couple of months have been lost.

Source: https://twitter.com/liamesler/status/744869507391324160

Thanks for the info, guys! It was driving me slightly bananas there for awhile...;) I managed to grab cdtweaks_beta_4 in early June before site went down...still down as of today (6/27)...!

Is there a mirror for the widescreen mod?

It's already noted that it had been a hard drive failure and the site is being restored, but a bit here about domain vs web hosting: they are separate entities, although many web hosts will offer to register your domain for you (often a bad idea, as it makes things more inflexible if you want to move to another hosting provider, and in many cases it results in the domain technically being property of the host rather than you), and most will maintain the DNS records for you regardless of who your domain is registered through (this is generally a good idea as it means your host names will be aligned properly with the way things are set up on the host).

In addition, regardless of how well both your website and DNS are maintained, it actually only takes fairly simple (though unlikely) failures to result in large swathes of users being unable to access your site - as most user-end PCs don't actually consult the "authoritative" DNS entries you/your host maintain directly but instead access them through a DNS server provided by their ISP or by some other party like Google or OpenDNS. These servers, once they've looked up the information once from the authoritative server, hold it in cache memory for a length of time called TTL - so if incorrect data is read or if changes are made to it, many people won't be able to access an affected site until the TTL runs out (causing the end user-accessed DNS server to once again look things up at authority). This is uncommon for established sites (usually resulting when a host moves sites to different physical servers during maintenance, thus changing the IP address of the sites), though on the other hand many people who've just set up a website run into this problem (often when a site is freshly opened, much of the Internet has to wait for one more TTL cycle to run out).