Fur Affinity is back online

Fur Affinity has resumed operations after more than a month of being offline. The site came back online the evening of August 5, 2008. It had been down since July 1, 2008, when Fur Affinity experienced what site owner Dragoneer described as a "server hardware fault"^[1]

During the duration of the outage, all FA-hosted pages showed an angry Fender stomping his computer in sheer anger, followed by a notice about the failure and a link to the forum thread, although this was switched for the Fur Affinity Forums logo a few days prior to the restoration.

All comments, journal posts, shouts and submitted media posted prior to the outage were kept and have now been restored with the re-opening of Fur Affinity.

Donations to Fur Affinity

As of July 7th 2008, Fur Affinity's members had donated about $16,000-$18,000 within 5 days,^[2][3] and donations were still coming in by the time the FA website returned.

Hardware purchases

On July 7th, Dragoneer posted on the FA forums that a new server, an HP ProLiant quad-core Opteron code-named Trogdor had been ordered. By Monday, July 14, 2008, the order for Trogdor was canceled due to confirmed issues. The vendor, CDW had promised to assemble and stress-test the server in advance, but only un-tested, unassembled parts arrived. Fur Affinity Forum users private messaged Fur Affinity Staff Member yak about the issues. The replacement for Trogdor was a Dell PowerEdge 2970. With the help of one Fur Affinity user, Fur Affinity received a discount on the Dell PowerEdge 2970. By Wednesday, July 23, 2008, the Data Server, Storage Array, and DB Server Upgrades had arrived. The Web Server has been shipped.

The hardware ordered since July 7th so far:

• Data Server - Dell Poweredge 2970 2U Server, 32GB RAM
• Storage Array - 14 1TB hard drives
• DB Server Upgrades - 24GB additional RAM
• Web Server - Sun Fire x4150 1U Server, 4GB RAM

Some called these hardware purchases excessive and unnecessary and questioned how the money was spent.^[4][5]

Sources

1. ↑ "Server Hardware Fault" (2008, July 1). Fur Affinity Forum.
2. ↑ FA Forums: Server Hardware Fault, page 120, post #1786 by Artie reads "$10,477.15 via Amazon, plus over $6,000 via PayPal. So, over $16,477.15 total so far." on July 6th 2008, 5:35PM EST
3. ↑ FA Forums: Public Donation and Expenditures Log, Please., page 1, post #15 by Seppel (based on an official file published by Dragoneer here) reads "I checked the budget Dragoneer posted. $18,000 is more than twice FA has ever had. [...] $18,000 will go far. Very far." on July 7th 2008, 9:03AM EST
4. ↑ Speaking out against FurAffinity idiocy
5. ↑ FurryArtPile.com = ROCKS!