A while ago I wrote about the
need for a new server. Well here it is. When you are reading this post you already arrived at the new server. I'm currently in the process of moving all the services over from the old one and the forum is one of the first things to move. I hope to complete the moving today but as I'm writing this, the wiki and the bugtracker is still at the old one.
In the post mentioned above I also asked how to finance the new server and asked what people would think about ads on the wiki. I got a few answers (in the forum. mailinglist and private) and most of it said "go ahead we don't mind". When I asked this I still wanted to buy new owned hardware which would have been quite expensive. But I did not buy hardware but instead decided to rent a server. This means my monthly fees are higher than before (a little bit more than twice than before) but on the other hand I don't need to invest a big sum of money at once.
To get a little bit of the monthly fees back I decided to use adsense, but only here in the forum. The wiki will stay adfree. I think this is a good compromise. Everybody who dislike them should just get the adblock Firefox extension. There I said it: feel free to block the ads if they annoy you. But hopefully they will be relevant enough to let a few people click them :-)
For the curious ones: The new server is a Athlon 4000+ DualCore machine with 2Gigs of RAM and 2x160GB disks on a hardware RAID. Performance issues should be a thing of the past now :-)
Andi
PS: I also switched from Apache to lighttpd which should improve the performance as well, but some glitches in the configs may have been introduced. If you encounter anything that doesn't work as expected just drop me a line please.