stephenjubb

As a Web Developer myself I am qualified to give opinion.
You give a service for which you do not charge (it's voluntary), no one can complain, you provide the touring community a great benefit.

You have good hardware backup and replication and I think have done at low cost. You have also wrote the web server software yourself if I remember correctly.

There is only yourself and you are clearly passionate about the site, even better you tour yourself. You are a combined engineer, site admin and web developer. A skillset that professionally would cost a lot to hire.

The only point of failure has been the internet service provider, them not wanting to remove the drives, perhaps is from fear of being sued if something goes wrong (I'm not saying you would) just as a culture Americans from observing from the UK, like to sue. Such a situation can hamper companies being able to help, as possibly may be the cause in this case. I don't know not living there I would like third party opinion.

You have given a clear explanation of the situation and feel bad about the server going down.

You have a solution to the problem.

You mention about the lack of planning to minimise server down time. Looking at it the server went into a degraded state mid october, right when you are moving house. The quickest solution is to get the drive replaced and plan a redeployment later.

That is what you did, but the Internet Service provider were not playing ball, which is strange, would love to know why. Either way without a sufficient explanation from them it is better to move the server.

The only way you could really have planned for such a situation is contingency planning and that takes big bucks so as a free service could not be done.

So based on my clinical analysis there really is no fault on your part whatsever.

cheers

Steve Jubb