22 Sep 2004

Eve Guardian

 

Hello.

 

There has been discussion and rumor about the status of Eve Guardian.

 

Well it is safe for me to say that Eve Guardian is fine. The ISP we used, from space donated to us, is not so fine. The true difficulties lie with them and our continued lack of "professional" level service lies there as well.

 

This situation is further complicated by the fact that the ISP, and server, are located out of common reach of any person affiliated with Eve Guardian. The donater does call that country home but his affairs keep him away for weeks at a time. Which may explain the lengthy outages or the long ambiguity in response.

 

This continuing difficulties with the ISP is unacceptable to staff of Eve Guardian. Even the person who kindly provided us with the space, for a year now, has also declared "enough is enough" over the situation. We aim to not only give you a reliable level of professionalism in our news service but also require that site availibility maintain professional levels of standards.

 

As of today, the 15th of September, I have made arrangements for professional level webhosting with another company. These arrangements should ensure that our availability meets levels equal to our expectation and needs.

 

The arrangements also included registering a new domain, "www.eveguardian.net", to avoid any significant outages during the transition, router updating, while we migrate our server inventories to the new "virtual" location.

 

I've been given assurances that our old server will be available this weekend and migration plans are being confirmed throughout the staff. At this time we are already hard at work in recreating our communications loop, through e-mail services, and hope that the new domain name will be active worldwide shortly. Until the completion, and testing, of the migration itself the domain name eveguardian.com will continue to point to this "bootleg" site.

 

Of course with any major change there are a variety of issues that come up. I, personally, apologize for what appears to be a dearth of news reporting. This site is being created, and maintained, manually and with all the matters at hand I have not been able to provide you the level of service I require. For that you have my sincerest apologies.

 

The other significant impact will be one of financial burden. Previously domain registration and hosting costs were completely donated by one of the Founders, Lou Zeta in fact. The depth of his donation to Eve Guardian, above his particpation in the creation of Eve Guardian, could not truly be assessed until one takes on that level of burden. (How he did it I don't know.)

 

The current financial burden is comprised of several parts. One is the cost of the hosting and bandwidth itself. If one shops around, as in Eve, it is relatively easy to locate service for nominal fees. The other costs are licensing fees for the applications that make Eve Guardian run.

 

After much debate we have decided to continuing utilizing these applications for two prime reasons. First is that we have made extensive modifications to the applications to make it ideal for our purposes. To start anew would also risk our archives not to mention alot of our successful practices.

 

Secondly, the webhost that we selected, based on cost vs. reliability, does not allow the many popular, and easier to configure, webfront applications. The lack of security and potential for host abuse inherit in these applications are the likeliest cause of their concerns. Whatever the specific cause using such "freeware" solutions is a clear violation of their terms of service. Such a violation is not acceptable to me after paying for one years hosting upfront.

 

Thus we have no choice but approach the community for assistance.

 

We could have gained hosting through numerous, and generous, community offers but Eve Guardian is only effective in part from our clear seperation from "in game" organizations. While we don't declare that we avoid some level of dramatics in the reporting of our news, it is after all supposed to be fun to read also, we do declare freedom from the politics that are very rampant within Eve.

 

So our only alternative is to kindly ask for monetary donations to help us bear the burden of our new found costs. For those of you who know me, or believe you do from watching me at any time understands just how difficult this is to ask. In part it feels like we are letting you down by having to approach you. And my guilt is complicated by the outages that have occurred.

 

However, a phrase written by Isaac Asimov, "you don't let your principles or morals get in the way of doing what is right."

 

So, without question, Eve Guardian is here to stay. The arrangements have been made. The cash has been given. The deal has been struck. Minus some small techinical matters things will be again on track.

 

Donate if you will, do not if you feel that way.

 

We will still be doing what we have always done.

 

And boldly doing so... ...

 

shar@eveguardian.net