(In)stability of

Hi,

Over the past 26 years or so I’ve enjoyed the free use of ibiblio to host a number of open-source educational projects including Lessons In Electric Circuits, Socratic Electronics, Socratic Instrumentation, and now Modular Electronics Learning Project. My students and I truly thank all those at ibiblio who have maintained this as a free hosting platform over those years.

Over the past couple of years, though, the website has been less than stable. Frequently access is either slow or outright denied for hours at a time, causing occasional problems for students needing to download files I’ve posted there. Sometimes it’s just the HTTP server that’s down, as I can still up/download files using sftp and manage files using ssh. Less frequently I lose access entirely.

In the interest of supporting my students, I need a reliable site for all my materials. Should I look into migrating to a different host, or do you know if this relatively recent instability is a passing phase?

Again, I want to express my sincere thanks for the many years of free hosting and I do not wish to come across as ungrateful.

Hi. We are as frustrated by recent instability as our contributors are, and I wish we had a clear and simple answer for all cases. In your case, please expect an email from us to the email you used when registering on this site tomorrow (Wednesday) in the morning, Eastern Standard time. If you haven’t seen an email by 3pm, please feel free to reach back out here.

We are making multiple technical, architectural, and capacity changes in parallel, and given the scope and nature of the changes, I can’t summarize them here. Please know that we’re working hard to deal with multiple challenges, one of which is an escalation in synthetic traffic that is more challenging to distinguish from legitimate users. Libraries, archives, and other public institutions worldwide are dealing with similar challenges.

Again, we’re committed to supporting our collections, and we’ll have a message directly to you in the morning about the changes that impact your collection in particular.