diane

my gender is lesbian

  • she/they

☠ this means my level is probably too high for you to attempt PVP


dante
@dante

cohost going down reminded me of when tumblr used to go down which made me think: was there ever a significant period of time, akin to early television stations, where websites were only up on like... certain days or hours?

i have to imagine that was a thing in the BBS era but i imagine by the time that html websites proper happened it was pretty unlikely, other than random outages. there had to be a couple websites in the early 90s that were like small forums or something ran out of a basement rig that were down on weekends or something though, right


coryw
@coryw

mood of the day: web site with business hours



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in reply to @dante's post:

one of my favorite features of '90s and '00s computers and software ecosystem is this idea of personal web site hosting, so i can 100% imagine there was like... web sites that were only online periodically, although i've long imagined the ultimate goal of the personal web site packages was to go along with (US centric warning) the future The Bells had been promising of universally deployed fiber

it wasn't a destination per se but once in a while in the dialup era, I'd turned on PWS to show people things or let them grab things. later i also had a wiki i hosted on my laptop that was only "online" when i was at home (moved that to a desktop basically as soon as was reasonably possible)

I used to host sites on our house's 300kbit/sec DSL. It went down kinda frequently. Software updates. Someone plugging in a new modem to the weird DSL ring. Tripping on the cord. Booting the computer into Windows to play Quake for a bit.

i hosted my own site and email on DSL, it was 1536/896kbit. it worked surprisingly well until that few months when i couldn't get it to train for more than like 30 minutes at a time, which was.... this was in 2013-2015 and to be honest it's amazing in retrospect how well that worked

i uh.... still host on dsl, i just moved and have more reliable 40/5 now

it's always been a thing around the margins -- when I was in community college, the student financial services web site was iirc open from 9 AM until 9 PM on weekdays and saturdays -- but a significant amount of time at a high profile? probably not

that said, hosting has gotten significantly more sophisticated since the '90s and 2000s; deep into the modern era of the internet, a lot of high-profile companies had world-visible server rooms on-premises, most of whom have now pushed them all to off-site colos or cloud computing datacenters, and google was famously originally run off of a stack of four servers in a lego computer case in someone's office at stanford

oh gosh, it wasn't until the 2010s i think that my university dropped the "we have a weekly maintenance window" on the SIS/ERP -- nowhere near as severe as that, but it was like, 4 hours weekly on sunday nights the whole thing goes offline "just in case"

(i now work at the same university from which i graduated) our SIS/ERP doesn't have that specific weekly interval now but there is a monthly thing on our cloud-hosted LMS and we do like, every-other-monthly software patches on the ERP itself

Most of the BBSes I logged on to had downtime to do callouts for gECHO based FIDONET relay updates. They only pulled content once a day, which all of the users could then call in to replicate, reply offline, and upload their reply packets to go out on the next relay call.

Very post officey.

in reply to @coryw's post:

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