It's not just excess bandwidth. It's cpu cycles, poor site coding, database issues. Like I said, not everything is backed by a huge company that has the money/hardware/engineering resources to absorb the load.
This is really unacceptable folks. There are those of us that have to keep these sites up, and it's seriously been a few years of nightmare scrapers and botnets, and stupid things like this that you are trying to legitimize that will make this worse. If a site doesn't want you, you should go away. There's a reason for it. Not every website is backed by a billion/trillion dollar company with the resources to absorb things.
WCMesh in California covers a few hundred miles of southern California on Meshcore.... That isn't flat. It really just depends on buy-in in the local region.
Real-ID is such a farce. I have had an ID since I was 15, and presented my birth certificate and ssn as a minor to do so. There is no instance where I am not "real".
I have a US Passport that took less effort and paperwork to get than a Real-ID. I will never submit.
For what it's worth, we're trying to do a lot of our server upgrades with the Elevate scripting to Almalinux, but man can it be a pain. We have a 30% success rate in testing, and even when it goes right it tends to be 2-3 hours of downtime. The alternative though is to rebuild every server on spare hardware and manually migrate data and configurations over. So it's still a better option once we can figure it out. I'm hoping to get downtime <1hr and >90% success rate before we start really pushing through these by April.
