I am sorry to say that the database is down again for some unknown reasons.
I've alerted the hosting provider and hope they will reset it quickly

This does affect adding new stories, count updates and other interactive features.
The Forum is not affected.

seems to be fine again..

So it seems that the last significant downtime was 10 years ago!

Unfortunately, the hosting provider at the moment is experiencing some issues (network storage related) so the website is down now. A fix is expected shortly.

It's back again!

The main database is down again - sorry! Working with the hosting company to get it back up safely...
Forum works!

It's back up again but we're still 'experiencing turbulence', so be patient with us...

We experienced some of the same issues today as we did 2 weeks ago. We're working on a sustainable solution but it requires a lot of effort.
In the meantime, as a preventive measure, I have set the updates of the Community overview page and the individual user pages to once a week. This is only temporary.

blocked a lot of IPs this morning. if there are issues let me know.

We could very well be target of either repeated DDoS attacks OR AI learning bots. In any case, we will need a Web Application Firewall in the near term to handle this. Follow up in different threat.

Bad news: As stated before, we dont have proper DDOS protection and the website was brought down again today. There really isn't anything we can do in the current setup and need to migrate to a different hoster and to a different way of managing the website.

I was already working on a migration, but with the urgency, we aren't sure that all features will be back. Probably, we will do a rougher version of the migration than originally intended.

Have you looked at a free plan on a CDN? Perhaps cloudflare. If its really a ddos attack then an edged based cdn and dns is your best solution!

An update:
- We are working hard on an intermediate solution to bring the website back up again asap 'as is' on a different server (for the future, we will go for this solution)
- We plan to add something like cloudflare as paul suggested as the access logs of yesterday make you cry to see how much abuse there was from outsiders (I may reach out to you paul via e-mail for experiences)
- Has content been lost? We're still evaluating the latest backups of the data in the database, but we don't expect that any content (such as reviews you recently submitted) has been affected.

In the meantime, hold on to your reviews (save them in a document), new photos, count updates and also lengthy new discussions or research items on the forum, There will be a switch-over moment to the new setup, and after that has proven to be working well we can add new content again.

Out of interest for those of us not involved in "Web matters" - what is "in it" for those initiating the DDOS - I can understand them trying it on for big companies and governmental etc Web sites. Is it that the Bots they release just attack any vulnerable Web site indiscriminately without knowing anything specific about the sites being attacked - in the hope that they may come up with one which might yield financial (or other) rewards........or are they just doing it for the "fun" of it? Would you expect that the perpetrators even know which sites they have "brought down" - if so would they be expected to contact such sites in some form of blackmail?? Are they also trying to destroy and acquire data or simply making "life" for the site "impossible"? I presume it is a constant battle like fighting viruses - and any combative "tool" which is successful today might not still be so in a few months?

Just an idea, you could add a passpord production for example on whs.org/temp/ and host the site there.
then, we can at least browse it :-) would not suggest adding reviews then though.

the maps are so helpful planning road trips lol :-) and missing already after a day.

Unfortunately, that is not possible - we do not have static files, they're all generated from a database.
You can browse via the waybackmachine, as linked on the homepage