Greetings to the Populace of Ansteorra from your Kingdom Webminister, Hersirkona kolfinna inn kyrra Otarsdottir!
Many of you may have seen posts, comments, emails, or chatter related to our Kingdom Websites and Discussion Lists in the last week or so. I bring to you word of what’s going on and what happens next.
tl;dr: Website storage was full; Webministers across the Kingdom are amazing and responded fast; storage is good now; no disruption of service. Mailing lists aren’t working right now; we have a plan to migrate and restore function to the Kingdom; More updates soon.
Act I – The Context
The Kingdom of Ansteorra hosts our WordPress site through SiteGround as a multi-site instance. This means we own the Ansteorra.org domain and we can create an unlimited number of subdomains for it — these subdomains are what you know and love as our websites! That multi-site hosting allows us space to store media, images, etc on all of our sites. However, that storage space is 1) shared across the domain and subdomains, and 2) it is limited.
On July 23rd, 2026 — we reached our storage capacity. Our storage provider gave us 5 days to reduce our storage consumption or risk disruption of service across any/all of our sites.
I want to be very clear that the Kingdom reaching storage capacity is not the fault of any one individual. The things that eat up the most storage are images and PDFs. The same way we each accumulate old files on our phones or personal computers, we inevitably accumulate old files in our websites. Sometimes you have to do a review and get rid of old files, and that’s what had to do here.
Act II – The Response
Because of the 5 day deadline from our hosting provider, I needed to free up space, fast. I started reviewing our Kingdom-level sites and sent an urgent request to Webministers across Ansteorra asking them to do the same within 2 days — if they see old or unused images/files, delete them and if they have PDFs/docs/images that they need to keep, upload a copy to Google Drive and then remove the file from the Media Library.
We have a LOT more storage space in Google Drive than in WordPress, and we can use our Drives to link and embed PDFs, images, Sheets, Docs, and more on our webpages without using up any of our WordPress storage. Moving files to Google Drive frees up space on our sites AND lets us keep the files we still want to display.
I am very happy to report that when I checked our current storage use for our WordPress hosting this afternoon — we have dropped from 102% usage to 14%!! That. Is. Incredible!
I would like to thank and commend every one of you who took such quick action to move your media files and pdfs away from WordPress and into Google Drive. You have literally saved the Kingdom sites from a disruption of service.
Act III – The Future
We need to continue to balance the limitations of our website storage against the very real need to keep our websites visually engaging and informative.
To keep us from slowly eating up our storage space for our websites, I’ve asked our Webministers across the Kingdom to please continue to move any PDFs and unused/old images out of the WordPress Media Library and prioritize storing them in Google Drive.
To keep our sites engaging and pretty, I’ve directed our Webministers to start using more features like WordPress Advanced iframe Blocks and the Embed from URL options to embed graphics, Docs, Sheets, PDFs, and more. If you or your Webminister wants help embedding cool graphics or docs on your site, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me!
I’ll be reviewing our Webminister training and Handbook to see how best to update our training and guidance. I think there are easy ways for me at the Kingdom level to do better about periodically reviewing storage usage, and ways to improve how our training covers this. If you’re in the Department, look for updates from me about that sometime soon.
Our mailing list hosting provider Dreamhost is sunsetting support for Discussion Lists. Their initial announcement and notifications said that they would start by not supporting new lists and wouldn’t impact existing ones right away. But, in the last week it has become clear that they have now also disabled support for even existing discussion lists.
This is why folks across the Kingdom are seeing error messages saying that “No such list…” exists.
From the admin side of Dreamhost, we can still access the lists, archives, and subscription info. That is really good! Our amazing Ansteorra Server Admin Emma de Fetherstan has already saved what we need to migrate and restore the lists under a different provider. She is already testing the process to migrate our Discussion Lists to our Google Workspace. The goal is to re-create our lists, repopulate subscriptions, and restore Discussion List for everyone.
While we sort out the details of migration, our Ansteorra, Group, Order, etc mailing lists will remain not working.
If you need to make announcements to the entire Kingdom, please make use of our Kingdom Facebook Page and Kingdom Discord server. OR, if you want to make publicly-visible announcements like this one, reach out to me and I can help get your info posted to our Kingdom website.
When we do get them up again, there will likely be changes to the interface, how you subscribe, etc. Look for updates from me soon with more details on that. I will let the Kingdom know when Discussion Lists become available again!
Ever in service,
Hersirkona kolfinna inn kyrra Otarsdottir, OP
Ansteorra Kingdom Webminister
kingdom@webminister.ansteorra.org
Saturday, July 18, 2026 from 8am to 5pm!
This event will be hosted virtually using Google Meetings.
The draft schedule is available online and we are looking for volunteers to be Hosts for our various meeting rooms.
Round Table leads will help you log into host accounts and you’ll have support throughout the day of the event as well.
You can volunteer to host meetings you need to attend anyway!
Hosts will be responsible for
If you’re interested in helping our teachers and officers, please sign up! Complete instructions will be provided to volunteers via email.
https://ansteorra.org/round-table
In Service,
Hersirkona kolfinna in kyrra Otarsdottir, OP
Kingdom Webminister, Round Table Tech Lead
kingdom@webminister.ansteorra.org