2025 Site Update & Future

Archoverflow is Back Online

Well, we are back. After almost 6 months of being down, Archoverflow is here. Things will keep moving around over the next couple weeks, and we don’t expect to be fully flushed out with how things will function properly for quite a bit.

So, what happened…?

We self hosted AOF using wordpress on Google Cloud. While this was the most economical option, it ended up with us continually needing to figure out PhP updates, and other random server things that got progressively more confusing over the last 5 years. Without proper oversight, the site ultimately went down as well behind on updates and couldn’t figure out the issue. To make matters worse, our template we purchased and were using basically hadn’t been updated and was completely lacking support. I’m sure it was something someone with the right experience could have fixed in a couple hours, but without making money, there is no budget for that.

Backups?

There were several backups we had, but everything required spending more money to figure out if we could actually restore these. Before we spent more money, we decided at this moment that we needed a longer term solution, how to make sure things work for months from now regardless of whatever updates needed to occur.

We wanted to run a resource site for Architects, not spend months in an IT bootcamp. At this moment —we stupidly— turned to squarespace. Using it for other sites, the one benefit is that it basically runs itself. They spin up more servers when needed, and the site and backend is just ‘handled’ for you.