Okay. Well, it isn’t going anywhere from my Github repo for a while. It’s free to maintain.
Yeah, that’s the downfall of the world wide web, one of many that were never addressed along with the inherent hackability of it.
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Oh, I didn’t see that you had made the mirror! Thanks for doing that.
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I got the search function working properly now too, so it’s more or less equivalent to the live site.
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This is really sad; I’ve been using ATI since not long after it started.
It’s such a beloved site that there must be a lot of people who would be willing to take it over in situ. What we wouldn’t want is some individual doing this. However well-intentioned they are they could get run over by a bus or lose interest. It would be far better to have a well-established (preferably non-profit) group step in.
This might sound like a weird suggestion, but could the Sutta Central team look into taking over the site? Imagine if each sutta there had a link to the corresponding text here? It would benefit visitors to ATI and also bring a lot of traffic to SC.
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It’s a conundrum. Because that’s exactly what BCBS is. I also was relieved when I heard that they took it over. But I am guessing that any group that takes it on and is not specifically a tech/preservation organization will always be at risk of giving up on it just like is happening now.
Honestly, it really should have been made into pure html/css when it was give over to BCBS. A site like that doesn’t need a “tech stack”.
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Access to Insight was probably the very first or one of the very first websites that got me interested in Buddhism, so the news of it shutting down is hard to hear.
I am sure there are hundreds of links posted here and elsewhere that will no longer function, perhaps there is an automated way to add a general link next to all of them to redirect anyone who is looking for its articles to the clone hosted by cdpatton
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It depends on the amount of traffic. Domain registration is cheap, an average of about $20 per year or so, but webhosting depends on the amount of traffic the server can handle.
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Not all hosts charge for this. Since ATI can be statically hosted, it can often be entirely free.
For example, Cloudflare (which runs like half the web) has long had unlimited bandwidth and unlimited static requests as part of their free plan.
Or free GitHub Pages, as per above:
But I’m not sure that digging too much into the motivations, rationale, and technicalities is an altogether skillful exercise in any case.
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Well played, Bhante. 
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Okay, thanks. Is it because it is static material that doesn’t change, doesn’t get updated? So I suppose that can’t be used with forums like DW and SC?
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It almost a pure html/css site. There are only a couple little page loaded Javascripts. The search function uses a Google service, it looks like, which is why it works fine, too. They may have been using scripts to generate a static site the way I do with Github Pages at Dharma Pearls.
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That’s a good idea. I sent an email to BCBS offering my services as a volunteer to convert the website to HTML/CSS and containerize it so it can inherit the security and maintenance of the FLOSS community so that the site can be preserved without much effort once the conversion is completed. It’s probably a long shot that they reply and accept my offer though, but @sujato did request a Bodhisattva’s assistance… 
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More or less yes.
more info...
For purely educational purposes:
“Dynamic” content with real-time updating needs a dynamic app server to handle requests (often against a database) whose responses are constantly changing.
“Static” content can be handled with a static server that only serves unchanging files as content.
The demarcation has certainly gotten more gray over time as the tech has evolved though (e.g. you can have a static server like NGINX with some dynamic Lua, but you’d usually have to self-host something like that. And you can still update static content (usually at a slower pace though)).
Generally speaking, the more standardized / “commoditized” and optimized the logic, the cheaper it becomes to host. Ofc every host can choose how they make profit though, so this is often, but not always, correlated with price (for example, Cloudflare chooses not to charge exorbitant bandwidth fees).
A static archive of the forums or a cached copy (many CDNs like Cloudflare also offer caching services; caching is kind of like static hosting with static rules) could be a back-up. But otherwise, correct, a dynamic forum couldn’t use a static host.
The main SC site for sutta readings, is largely static though (see also SuttaCentral Express and the offline PWA). Search, for example, is dynamic though. The software for making translations, Bilara, is fairly dynamic. Etc
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As for many here, ATI was the first (and probably the only) website I used back in 2000 when I started my Theravadin practice. It amazed me that so much wisdom was offered freely to anyone with internet access. I’ve since bought books that have everything that was posted on ATI so I stopped using it years ago. It saddened me that it was abandoned. But my feelings about it are a lesson in anicca, tanha, and dukkha, I suppose. However, it’s absolutely wonderful that so many people are suggestion solutions and offering services to keep ATI a going concern. Such a cool community.
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Well, even a non-profit Buddhist group can find that running a large sutta website isn’t for them. But for the sake of continuity and integrity, another non-profit group (preferably, as you say a tech preservation organization) is the best bet. It’s great to have mirrored sites, but having 600,000 broken links on the web is less than ideal.
Bhante @sujato: any thoughts about SC offering to take the site over from BCBS? Put a link in every sutta on ATI to the corresponding text here, and you’ll get a lot more visitors. You’d also preserve a valuable resource and prevent broken backlink chaos on a massive scale.
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BCBS responded to me saying they are going to be reviewing proposals including new stewards for the website so if the team here is willing that seems like the best outcome.
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Has a bandwidth limit of 100 GB / month which is certainly less than AtI’s traffic.
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Oh they didn’t use to have a hard limit. Would usually just 429 if there are too many concurrent requests. (which may or may not be enough for ATI).
But it is documented now as a “soft limit”, so above that may still be allowed to an extent. It doesn’t require a payment method to use, so they can’t charge a fee exactly either.
If I’m not mistaken, GitLab Pages still doesn’t have a documented limit.
It does seem like Cloudflare is still the leader by a wide margin though. Closest I can see is AWS Cloudfront at 1TB/month free or $15/month for 50TB, which is still quite a bit worse than unlimited for free 
.
Although for a non-profit, there’s probably a cloud company willing to donate the necessary bandwidth too.
“just”
When I went over, they started serving the Unicorn of Death to some (but not all) of my traffic.
If you stay over the limit for a while, they send a polite but firm email about finding alternate hosting.
“documented”
If you suddenly threw a terabyte of traffic at them, I’m sure they would also send you an email pretty quickly!
Indeed.
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Some GH Pages nuances, but probably getting a bit off-topic, so hiding this...
Yes, I’m aware that’s what they generally send for all sorts of errors. But, at least last time I experienced it, it was concurrency related, rather than a hard block. So when concurrent traffic decreased, it started working fine again. I’m not sure if it still works like that (it’s not really documented) - idk if your experience was concurrency related or not.
I meant that that’s better than completely shutting a site down for even a single request above . Not ideal obviously, but not horrendous for being free either.
But yea if they requested this of you and gave no exceptions, then I imagine ATI’s traffic situation would be even less tenable to host on GH Pages 