For historical reasons, the LEF is a bit sensitive to downtime - it used to vanish for anything from hours to weeks at a time. Indeed, it was wrestled (pretty literally) from its founder at some considerable effort & cost because a few of us wanted to move it to a reliable host, and to try to rebuild the trust that was lost in the "bad old days".
Unfortunately, the host we've moved it to - whilst immeasurably better than the predecessor, still has a less than stellar reputation when it comes to up time. Plus, the linux distro it runs on is getting old, it went out of support last year so there's no new patches (e.g. for a couple of serious vulnerabilities which have shown up in the last few months)... And for some reason, this particular virtual machine seems prone to crashing unexpectedly, all by itself, requiring a reboot. It is, by some margin, the least reliable Linux VM I have ever encountered...
Unfortunately, despite "rescuing" the forum from certain oblivion, we have lost many fine contributors from the early days, probably as a result of the unreliability. Once a reputation is formed, it's difficult to repair it, especially if the damn thing continues to fall over on an all-too-regular basis...
Anyway, it's not all philanthropy on my part - I use the same VM to host my e-mail & forum photos, so I want a more reliable platform as well! I've found a couple of possibilities, one US based and one UK based, both are similarly priced to my current provider, I just need to try to find out which ones seem to have the better reliability & up-time...
Cheers!
Ade.