Hey now, it's cool and edgy to hate FA and its staff. You want to be one of the cool kids, don't you?

Heh... in this day and age why would anyone praise the amount of uptime a site like FA has? Given modern datacenters and hosting providers with SLAs, it's just plain expected now that sites will have below a 0.05% downtime. FA is one of the FEW sites that's not true for... in fact, I'm fairly certain it has the most downtime of any site, large or small, that I've used in the last 5 years.

I'm not trying to say it's the end of the world or anything when FA goes down.. and quite frankly, I really don't care at all when it's down. I have plenty of other things to do.

I like weasyl. I'm as active there as I am here. It has better features, and higher resolution art, just a smaller community and no working literature engine. Not like there's anyone telling me I have to pick one or the other. I'm not about to stop lurking here until such time as there's few artists left here... more than before though I think I entertain this as a distinct possibility, that there will come a time... but I digress.

Well, let's be fair here, a data center with the best service level agreement in the world wouldn't have kept FA up. It was down because of software issues, not because their colo dropped the ball.

FA, in my opinion, is in the pretty rare position of being a free hobby-ish site with a gigantic user base. It survives on donations and ad revenue. Sure, given giant piles of cash, they could pay somebody to whip up a distributed system with plenty of redundancy and load balancing, but I think five nines of uptime is a pretty unrealistic expectation for a labor-of-love site which isn't backed by a big business.

I think you hit on right on the head when you said that Weasyl is a smaller community. I'm pretty sure that if you dumped FA's user base on them, they would have to contend with the same issues. Maybe they would end up handling it better, who knows, but it's certainly not an easy task to design a system that can stand up to a huge number of users.

That's fair, sure, but I was just making a point in that it's kinda s stretch to suggest that anyone should be going 'Wow! FA is up like 95% of the time! that's a lot!" Because it really is in the lowest percentile or two for reliability compared to other sites overall.

Weasyl probably isn't currently built to handle the load that FA handles, but that's an intentional hardware limitation, because as of now there still isn't a need for it. But hardware can scale up easily as the community grows if you don't have horribly broken software running on it.

FA would have been far more successful if they hadn't repeatedly, time and time again, refused offers of free help from professional coders that actually know how to build a site like this. THAT is why FA's troubles are entirely the fault of its own staff. They can't blame a shortage of talent, only their refusal to utilize any talent that is offered to them.