New advertising technique

[David Lindon]

im still very curious about all this hosting business. i mean you can get decent hosting from free-£15 a month. does a forum like this really need its own server? obviously it would be better, but how noticable is it?

I have a number of other sites aswell on the same server.

Most low cost hosting packages oversell the resources. They offer 5GB or whatever really cheap because they know most people will just want to run a static website roughly 100MB

 

[J03]

If I where david, I would get 2-3 lower-end VPS's, and spread his sites across them...

 

[root]

im still very curious about all this hosting business. i mean you can get decent hosting from free-£15 a month. does a forum like this really need its own server? obviously it would be better, but how noticable is it?

looking at the previous page, I suggest that you try something.

save the page. look at the saved files and delete all the adverts.
then look at the total size of the data, it's around 600KB (half a meg).

shared Microsoft server hosting at 1&1 is £12 per month, with a storage limit of 4GB and a traffic limit of 40GB per month.

we've established that there are perhaps 200 members.
and I'll say that I'm a fairly light user I might view perhaps 40 pages a day.
(that's 20MB per day, and roughly 600MB per month)
so with 200 active members that's roughtly 120,000MB (120GB) of traffic per month.

that pushes you into the needing the professional package that it £33 a month for this domain only, (not to mention David's other domains, -though for the sake of argument we'll assume that there is advertising there and they also pay for themselves).

so for £33 a month you get probably enough space, and just enough traffic for light users of this site.
though heavier users will probably view closer to 100 pages a day. (if all 200 did that you need a traffic limit of 600GB/month -just for this site). -and at £1 per GB traffic cost over the 200GB limit that puts the price of running just CF at £430 per month...

now assume that the other domains that david hosts on the servers take up even half of that, you're probably knocking on the door of 1TB per month data going in and out of the server. i.e once you've used up the first 200GB and then 800GB more you've got a very (very) large bill landing on the mat if you go with a shared server.


now look at the dedicated servers.
£90 a month gets you 2 x 2core processors and a couple of gigs of ram - probably enough to run a forum, but with unlimited traffic.
500GB of space too.

even the most expensive package runs at only £300 p/m for 2.25TB of storage space 16GB of ram and 8 processing cores...

but I digress...

the point I'm making is quite easy.
with shared hosting offering limited space, limited traffic and added traffic billing that could push hosting costs into around £1000 per month...

why wouldn't you go with the dedicated option?

and to come back on this thread, having gone out and posted some real figures from a hosting provider...

when the cost to david is going to be possibly nearing £1000 a year, (assuming he has cheaper hosting that 1&1) then why all the fuss about a little button underneath your name that helps keep this place going.

this is, pretty much a massive forum. and hosting doesn't pay for it's self.

if adverts are needed, then I personally would much rather that they are small adverts like those buttons than massive in line ads that take up the space that a normal posting would.

 

[ace777]

i view lie 40 a day as well but i think there aren't 200 fully active members more like 100-150

 

[J03]

looking at the previous page, I suggest that you try something.

save the page. look at the saved files and delete all the adverts.
then look at the total size of the data, it's around 600KB (half a meg).

shared Microsoft server hosting at 1&1 is £12 per month, with a storage limit of 4GB and a traffic limit of 40GB per month.

we've established that there are perhaps 200 members.
and I'll say that I'm a fairly light user I might view perhaps 40 pages a day.
(that's 20MB per day, and roughly 600MB per month)
so with 200 active members that's roughtly 120,000MB (120GB) of traffic per month.

that pushes you into the needing the professional package that it £33 a month for this domain only, (not to mention David's other domains, -though for the sake of argument we'll assume that there is advertising there and they also pay for themselves).

so for £33 a month you get probably enough space, and just enough traffic for light users of this site.
though heavier users will probably view closer to 100 pages a day. (if all 200 did that you need a traffic limit of 600GB/month -just for this site). -and at £1 per GB traffic cost over the 200GB limit that puts the price of running just CF at £430 per month...

now assume that the other domains that david hosts on the servers take up even half of that, you're probably knocking on the door of 1TB per month data going in and out of the server. i.e once you've used up the first 200GB and then 800GB more you've got a very (very) large bill landing on the mat if you go with a shared server.


now look at the dedicated servers.
£90 a month gets you 2 x 2core processors and a couple of gigs of ram - probably enough to run a forum, but with unlimited traffic.
500GB of space too.

even the most expensive package runs at only £300 p/m for 2.25TB of storage space 16GB of ram and 8 processing cores...

but I digress...

the point I'm making is quite easy.
with shared hosting offering limited space, limited traffic and added traffic billing that could push hosting costs into around £1000 per month...

why wouldn't you go with the dedicated option?

and to come back on this thread, having gone out and posted some real figures from a hosting provider...

when the cost to david is going to be possibly nearing £1000 a year, (assuming he has cheaper hosting that 1&1) then why all the fuss about a little button underneath your name that helps keep this place going.

this is, pretty much a massive forum. and hosting doesn't pay for it's self.

if adverts are needed, then I personally would much rather that they are small adverts like those buttons than massive in line ads that take up the space that a normal posting would.

But it depends on the Hosting Package you get, and who you get it from...?

If you think that unlimited Dedicated bandwidth is OK, why not get unlimited SHARED bandwidth?

 

[root]

But it depends on the Hosting Package you get, and who you get it from...?

If you think that unlimited Dedicated bandwidth is OK, why not get unlimited SHARED bandwidth?

there are some very good points in this thread about how you can find cheaper hosts, how it could be possible to split the forum items across multiple free hosts to save costs...

I guess the point of what I'm saying is that I'm sure that David has checked out all the options and is on the cheapest host that he can find that actually does the job. (white screens aside)

I'm fairly sure that after all the talk about keeping the place here looking professional, he's not putting up adverts here to line his pockets, just pay the hosting bills...

which as I've said before are probably far and away more than what most of us suspect they are, I mean most of us happily set up our own forums, and have a few members, and these run OK from a home server, but none of them receive nearly as much traffic as this site does.

I guess without some kind of technical input from David we are just left in the realms of wild speculation, (like I made). but I'm still fairly sure that he knows what he's doing.

 

[dude_se]

@root. ive got the business pro 1and 1 package and its £14.99 a month with 5 free domains and lots of other stuff. i get 100gb bandwidth as standard.
i dont know how much david pays for the server. im just saying does he really need one when he could consider options like this.

 

[J03]

looking at the previous page, I suggest that you try something.

save the page. look at the saved files and delete all the adverts.
then look at the total size of the data, it's around 600KB (half a meg).

shared Microsoft server hosting at 1&1 is £12 per month, with a storage limit of 4GB and a traffic limit of 40GB per month.

we've established that there are perhaps 200 members.
and I'll say that I'm a fairly light user I might view perhaps 40 pages a day.
(that's 20MB per day, and roughly 600MB per month)
so with 200 active members that's roughtly 120,000MB (120GB) of traffic per month.

that pushes you into the needing the professional package that it £33 a month for this domain only, (not to mention David's other domains, -though for the sake of argument we'll assume that there is advertising there and they also pay for themselves).

so for £33 a month you get probably enough space, and just enough traffic for light users of this site.
though heavier users will probably view closer to 100 pages a day. (if all 200 did that you need a traffic limit of 600GB/month -just for this site). -and at £1 per GB traffic cost over the 200GB limit that puts the price of running just CF at £430 per month...

now assume that the other domains that david hosts on the servers take up even half of that, you're probably knocking on the door of 1TB per month data going in and out of the server. i.e once you've used up the first 200GB and then 800GB more you've got a very (very) large bill landing on the mat if you go with a shared server.


now look at the dedicated servers.
£90 a month gets you 2 x 2core processors and a couple of gigs of ram - probably enough to run a forum, but with unlimited traffic.
500GB of space too.

even the most expensive package runs at only £300 p/m for 2.25TB of storage space 16GB of ram and 8 processing cores...

but I digress...

the point I'm making is quite easy.
with shared hosting offering limited space, limited traffic and added traffic billing that could push hosting costs into around £1000 per month...

why wouldn't you go with the dedicated option?

and to come back on this thread, having gone out and posted some real figures from a hosting provider...

when the cost to david is going to be possibly nearing £1000 a year, (assuming he has cheaper hosting that 1&1) then why all the fuss about a little button underneath your name that helps keep this place going.

this is, pretty much a massive forum. and hosting doesn't pay for it's self.

if adverts are needed, then I personally would much rather that they are small adverts like those buttons than massive in line ads that take up the space that a normal posting would.

You also need to consider those who are not members. There are hundreds of guests here every day - They need to be accounted for too!

 

[dude_se]

@j03, hes based it on 200 active members. There is only around 20 active members and the rest are guests though, but at maximum there are 200 people online whoever they are.

So if each page is 600kb, and i view around 80 pages a day, evey day for 30 days that works out at around 1.5gb of my bandwidth. seems a lot

 

[J03]

A lot of the files are Cached though... And where are you getting 600KB from? For me, this page is 150KB, EXCLUDING the images.. Are there really 450KB of images? And if there are that many images, then wouldnt they be cached anyway..?