Tuesday morning, one of my friends informed me that my web forum was offline. I didn’t think too much about it (servers reboot occasionally) until I noticed another one of my sites was also offline. Both sites were built on an older version of PHP, and a few minutes of troubleshooting revealed that my webhost (HostGator) had unceremoniously (read: “without notification”) removed PHP5, instantly breaking two of my websites. One of the sites, one I used to track my bookmarks, was salvageable. The other, my forum, was completely broken. The technical issues were complicated by the fact that my forum… (read more)