This isn't a complaint. But more of a reflection of where we were and where we are now. When I really first got started, we had a physical server. It had some age on it. And to complicate matters, our hosting company/data center was.... well..... horrible. I can't even count the number of times we had outages with them. Trying to get help on anything was difficult. Because the provider honestly, they were understaffed. Many of you will remember the times we constantly were down. I dealt with that side of things along with a lot of broken things in the forum database/software. I worked at that for a while getting the old software up to the latest version they had. (vBulletin) I can also remember the times I battled literally all night with hackers. I can remember the times I had to restore database backups. All sorts of not fun things. We moved away from that hosting company and went to a inclusive hosting platform that has made our uptime almost 100%. We've also moved away from vBulletin software as well. Because they've honestly fallen way behind in the market.
I know everyone wants the site up all the time. And they want nothing to change. But I promise everything we've done is for the betterment of the site. Some things have gone away over the years because we've basically gone from a chevy to a ford in terms of software differences. I never like losing a function. But it's also something I have to consider long term. Do you stay with something that support is dwindling/dying or move to the best option out there? I have to side with the later.
I enjoy what I do here, even though at times it can be difficult. I never got the chance to serve. So at least I'm able to help a lot of vehicles that did serve and a ton of great vets here on the site. I thank you all for making steel soldiers a great place.