This is sad news endeed.
The reason why is explained here by Serval...

I hate to say it, but I've got bad news for the SPS fans

Hello,

I'm sad to say that today became clear that the curtain will fall for Simmers Paint Shop.
There are two reasons for this.
One: it is becoming too expensive to run this site (I'll go into this later in this post)
Two: I have too little time to manage the site. Even though moderation doesn't take much time, and most in the communition behave themselves well. The reason is that half of my time I work outside the country and anyway far (especially measured in time) from home. This adds some 60% of time to my working week.

Why is it too expensive? SPS is hosted on one server with Nederlandseluchtvaart.nl both are sites which contain many images and other big files, and thus generate quite some data. So. the cheapest hosting solutions are not an option. To make up for the costs, I use Google ads and donations. The software I used bevcame older and older. Some parts were no longer supported and blocked security updates of the forum software. So, the site lost some popular parts, but also the friendly URL's we used had to be disabled. This meant a drop of 60% of the visitors for both sites. Simply because people were no longer landing on the proper page or even at the site.
Updating the software (as I recently did) requires new licenses and a new server, which increased the costs even more.

But SPS is allready updated right?
True, and the effects of this effort do look positive. But I also need to be carefull, because holidays and recent publicity also generate temporary traffic.
And nederlandseluchtvaart.nl has not been updated yet. And to cover the costs of the server, both sites need one another, since each generates about half of the income and half of the traffic, measured over the last eight years.
And still this income of both sites is only good to cover 35% of the costs I have to make to maintain them. The upgrade plans, and connection to Facebook and Twitter were meant to increase this by drawing more visitors and to lift penalties Google makes.

But a series of incidents over at nederlandseluchtvaart.nl made me decide to close down the site today. This means that the income from that site has gone per immediately. And this also means that even less of the costs to maintain the site are covered.
This leaves me no other choice then to ask the ISP to cancel the contract for the server. And this means that SPS also needs to close down.

I cannot tell when the server will be switched off, but I will leave SPS open until that day has come. I assume it will be within a month. This leaves you the chance to pickup the resources of the site, which you like to have for yourself.

Leaves me to thank you all for supporting this site for over ten years. A
nd I like to invite you to join the SPS community over at Facebook. At least this givves you the chance to stay in touch with eachother. The link for the community is: https://www.facebook.com/groups/simmerspaintshop/

Serval have now a blog where you will be able to find most of the resources from the site.
It can be found here: Logtnest

I have invited the people there to look at Axis & Allies Paintworks as a possible future host of work.

Cheers

That is sad news.

Sucks. This was a great resource for fonts and so much more.
Cam