One of the most active Nissan LEAF forums mynissanleaf.com is offline this morning. Visitors to the site are greeted with the message “This account has been suspended. Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible”. Judging by the error provided it’s because the amount of storage or web traffic on the site this month has exceeded the hosters’ account quota.
The forum uses a open source forum system called phpbb. The software itself is free, but someone has to pony up the money or resources to host a server 24/7/365 and the internet bandwidth it consumes.
The site is advertising supported, members can have the adverts suppressed if they contribute $10 to the forum owner. So the site should have generated some money, maybe it’s just on too low of a hosting plan. The traffic and storage consumed will have increased as the number of LEAF owners has increased and signed up as members.
Hopefully the forum owner will resolve the issue later today.
Update: 201-08-17 12:48pm CDT
The Forum is operating normally again. I found the following comment on a Facebook Page I discovered.
The site was planned to be moved this weekend once we received funding etc. This is a double whammy outage, as the Domain Registrar is reporting name server routing issues, and the web host is having issues at the same time. We will be moving the site to the new server as soon as we can – hopefully later today.
Looks like it was a perfect storm of technical issues. It was brought back online reasonably quickly.
Tesla Model 3 
Thank-you for hosting this page and providing status. A Google search found this page, hope too many visitors don’t bring this page down as well!. I think it is time for all Leaf members to pony up and pay the dues to keep Nissan Leaf forum site alive 24/7/365. Voluntary may not be good enough. It is too valuable a site to go down so frequently.
No problem. I am a contributor to the forum, so I’ve ‘done my bit’ to help keep it going. I agree its a valuable forum, I have learned a great deal about my car via the forum.
If someone notices its up before I do, post a comment here to let everyone know.
Yeah, I am a contributor too and I think a nominal contribution of $10/year or so should not break anyone’s bank. That’s 2.5 gallons of gasoline. I spend an hour or so at least per day looking at stuff on the site – definitely hope it was not someone with malicious intent to damage its operation.
This has been an ongoing issue with the website for a year or so. The excuse it was down, for 12 or so hours, last time was that the site administrators wife had a baby. I think your analysis, jpwhitehome, is correct. They are likely on a pay as you go plan and they are exceeding their budget. Being off line for a day is one way to reduce your traffic but I’m not sure if it help your long term success.
I did receive an acrimonious comment to this post I chose to trash that was very critical of Nissan and its vehicles. Lots of four letter words were used. It is always possible that the site has been hacked or someone launched a DDOS attack to bring it down. Be interesting to see the real reason once the site is restored to its full glory 🙂
The forum is operational again. I just discovered there is a facebook page for keeping up with site status. https://www.facebook.com/pages/My-Nissan-Leaf-Forum/126196814141527