Welcome to the new wolvhaven.net

Hi WolvHaveners, welcome to the brand-new wolvhaven.net! This website was originally supposed to be a temporary stop-gap solution for the website being down, but if feedback is positive, we will keep this website as official website from now on.

An explanation of what happened

Before 2020, the server was hosted in Europe on a VPS. The website was hosted on another website hosting service, and the wiki was hosted on ShoutWiki.

The website hosting service’s marketing got to me and I subscribed to the service, putting wolvhaven.net on it while not realising that the price for hosting the website essentially doubled or even tripled when it came to renewal (after a period of like 2 years).

In light of me entering university back then, it was decided that all services would be centralised onto a custom-built PC we dubbed “materwelon” which nixholas has kindly helped us with over the years, as it would be more economical. It would also allow us to move the wiki out from Shoutwiki, which was rather unreliable.

However, moving everything into our own DIY infrastructure posed its own challenges - particularly with networking, and centralising all our services into a single machine meant that whenever network connection issues occured, all services, including the server, website, and wiki would go down - it was essentially a single point of failure.

In July 2023, nix had to perform some network changes but some additional issues related to network configuration popped up. The server was prioritised and the web services were to be settled at a later date. But due to everyone’s busy schedules (nix with work, me and other staff members with uni) this has not been resolved since, and networking issues are unfortunately only resolvable by nix.

Since my schedule has let up a little, I’ve created this website as a stop-gap measure in order to ensure essential information for the server is up and running.

How this website is different

Our previous website used WordPress, which required a database to operate (the wiki does too). This meant that we would need a web hosting provider which provided a database in order to create, store, and serve website data like the page content or even the blog content.

The choice for WordPress was more suitable back then, as Discord was still an emerging product. A lot of communication as well as discussion was often held on the forums which was a plugin integration for WordPress. As time went by, many of the features we needed such as the forums, and events were not required anymore, evidenced by the retirement of the forums in 2018, and the fact the events plugin had not been used for a long time since.

The new website uses Static-Site-Generation (SSG) which essentially converts the entire website into a bunch of HTML and CSS files which can then be hosted for free on GitHub pages. While this can also technically be done with WordPress, it would require me to setup a whole database and configure everything on my end which is way too much trouble.

We were initially exploring this option in 2020 as well, but were not satisfied with the technology options available back then. Moving away from Wordpress also allows us more control over how the website should be (which is a double-edged sword in it’s own right but anyway), allowing for easy customisation.

Future plans

Since I’m going through some major life stuff right now, I’ll only be able to focus more attention to larger aspects of the server when things stabilise.

As of now, the wiki will still unfortunately continue to be down (since it cant be SSG-ed while maintaining the ability to edit pages etc. easily) and is subject to when nix will be free to resolve the issue. Old post data from the previous website may be progressively migrated over here if we decide to keep this website.

In the future I am also considering moving the server back to Europe onto a VPS (which should solve a lot of network woes).

Some have also asked about purchasing Supporter rank or making financial contributions to the server. However given the current state of affairs I do not think it would be right to accept such contributions. When things stabilise, I’ll consider accepting contributions again.

Thats all, thanks for sticking around during this difficult time.

SilverWolv