Lupinia Hosting Is Shutting Down

Since 2001, I've been providing web hosting to sites that needed it, in some form or another. For awhile, I tried to run a for-profit web host. Later, upon joining the furry fandom, I decided to run such a service as a non-profit to benefit the community. This is the state the Lupinia Hosting Community has operated in since 2004, and truth be told, I've never been a particularly good web host. This isn't my day job, and most of the time, I didn't have time to give the level of service I owed to sites hosted here. As time has progressed, this has gotten worse, as I've dedicated more time to my career and less time to side projects. Additionally, after purchasing server hardware in 2007, the hosting technologies used here have stagnated; we're still running the same zero-redundancy server that we were in 2007, with all the same software, and it's a genuine miracle that we've had no serious downtime over the years.

This lack of redundancy has been worrying me since the dedicated server went online, and I always assumed I'd acquire more servers and expand the Lupinia Hosting Community at some undetermined point in the future, when I had more income to put into it. More than 6 years later, it's occurred to me that not only do I no longer have the time required to set up a new server similar to this one, I really don't want to. My career has diverged from server administration even further than it had when I set all this up, and to put it simply, I'm tired of running a hosting provider that is also a massive money sink.

The experience of running this service has been mostly positive over the years, and I learned a lot from it. But, unfortunately, the time has come for us to go our separate ways, and for the sites resident here to look for a new home. I appreciate the trust all of you placed in me and my ability to manage a server, but I think it would be best for all of us if you placed that trust in a company that actually does this for a living, and if I stuck to managing my own projects.

If you're an existing user of the hosting services here, you should have already received a message of some sort about this. If you did not, please email me ASAP, I'm happy to help you move and to help make the transition off this server as seamless as possible. The shutdown date for web services is August 1, 2014, though that may come sooner if everyone moves faster than that. If you're looking for a host for your website, I'm afraid I can't help you, but I highly recommend NearlyFreeSpeech.

Lastly, to everyone who contributed money to the Lupinia hosting fund: I assure you, your money was not squandered. There haven't been any donations in a long time, and the ones that were received over the years went toward hardware/software purchases, hosting fees, domain name renewals, and other assorted costs of doing business. There was never a large amount in the Lupinia account, but for what was contributed, I'm deeply thankful. It truly helped, because until relatively recently, I sometimes didn't have the money to keep the server up and running. More importantly, contributing was a statement of trust, and I hope I never betrayed that trust.

Thank you, everyone, for contributing to the Lupinia Hosting Community. It may be time to bring it to an end, but it was fun while it lasted, and I hope I was able to bring some good to the internet, and to the fandom, by giving some truly spectacular sites a home.

 -Natasha L.