I don't think it's me. I think it's something with the hosting provider. The issues began back in September. Maybe they upgraded or changed something on the server end. At a $10 per month hosting fee, I don't get daily briefings. When something is awry, I wait a while, and if the issue is not resolved, then I e-mail support, and they fix the problem.
The main issue over the past six weeks or so is the database server stops running for some reason, and support simply restarts the server, usually after I e-mail them. That's what happened this morning.
But the latest "problem" is the slowness of the site over the past few days. It takes way too long to load pages now, especially the homepage. Since Friday or Saturday, the server has been under tremendous load for most of the time. But from what I can tell, it's nothing that Toledo Talk nor myself is doing to cause the extra load. I have not made any significant changes in recent weeks to cause a problem. I have not contacted support about the slowness and the server load, and I don't plan to. The $10 per month fee also means that I share a server with dozens of other websites.
I've hosted Toledo Talk at HE.net for nearly nine years. I first interacted with HE.net as a hosting provider for work back in 1996 or 1997. They've been reliable, and support has been responsive, even for an account that's using their cheapest plan. The fee has been $10 per month, since Toledo Talk began in January 2003. They've upgraded the server multiple times. In the past, I rarely contacted support. But recently, I have contacted them several times. This recent stretch of outages and slowness is the worst experience I've had with HE.net. But I don't plan to change hosting providers. I may upgrade to the next level.