April this year I changed my webhoster to an US based provider because the performance of The Owl's Nest had become absolutely unacceptable. The coming months were great - I received a technical perfect and very friendly support. Since I was very much taken by real-life work I did not immediately realize that the daily visitor count was down to a half of the former average and that there was no traffic at all from many countries. Large parts of South America, Africa and Asia were gone. I started to ask questions and learned that the IP ranges of these countries were blocked by default and that this is common practice. The reasoning was that most visits originating from there are attacks anyway.
Until now I have encountered nothing worse than some data harvesting attacks on my web data. And I want The Owl's Nest accessible for everybody. So this left me with no choice than to move again. The Owl's Nest is now hosted in Switzerland, and traffic from the blocked countries is coming in again.
I am sorry for this incident - it never occurred to me that website traffic could be blocked pro-actively. The good news is that the new infrastructure is as fast as the last one.
Some further news:
1. This weekend I have migrated several pages from flat file format to SQL.
- the real military aircraft reference page, 1009 records
- the MAIW Packages reference page, 268 records
- the military AI reference page, 2931 records
These pages had become extremely large and the load time was dreadful with a slow internet connection or on a mobile device. Now they should load very fast, plus the data grid has better sort and filter features.
2. I have replaced the "Most missing AI Aircraft Poll" with a new one. One reason was to prevent people from pushing a single aircraft. Also it had been requested to be able to vote for several aircraft at once.
- the poll history has been taken over
- you can vote for as many aircraft as you want in one go
- you can vote once every 24 hours
- the result list is sortable
3. Daryl Payne, a very talented painter, has stepped away from this hobby. Sooner or later his web presence will be gone. In order to make sure that his great collection of paints is not lost he has moved it under the umbrella of The Owl's Nest. He has a dedicated section: Daryl Payne's AI Paints Collection.
4. Zsolt Beleznay is another very talented painter and luckily he is still active. He as well has a dedicated section for his repaint collection at The Owl's Nest. You find it here: Zsolt Beleznay's AI Paints Collection.
5. Last week was the first time after half a year that I started the sim with the intention to make some screen shots. If you are interested to see the AI Bell UH-1 Iroquois from Jordan Moore & Rob Nieuwenhoven, then check out the AI Screen Shot Gallery.
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