<< Photo Competitions >> Megalithic Portal upgraded and costs tripled PLEASE READ
Submitted by Andy B on Saturday, 13 March 2004 Page Views: 7558
Rock ArtDear All,We're now up and running again. We had become too popular for the server I upgraded to in January. I was going to send a mail out threatening to close the site, but on reflection I feel that would be rather dishonest as I'm sure you all know that it means too much to me to it to shut it down.
Instead, I've paid for another hosting upgrade, which is now costing me $99 (£53) a month. At least exchange rates are working on our favour at the moment.
This will bring our total web hosting bill for 18 months to over £1200 ($2300). I'm a fairly ordinary person with a small house, wife and kids so we run the online shop and ask for contributions towards our costs. The shop sells original CD-ROMs, very reasonably priced books, rings, T-shirts and lots more.
The recent site suspensions have been due to the high resource usage of our real-time pages and map plotting features. This is purely due to our popularity, with up to 100 users browsing at once. No data has been lost in the suspensions so please carry with on your submissions.
I worked night and day last weekend blocking unwanted search engine traffic and adding complex efficiency improvements to the core SQL database queries. I increased the page loading speed but it wasn't enough to bring the resource usage down. It also introduced some obscure problems with user logins so I'll probably take these changes out again.
The eGallery and photo posting restrictions are now removed.
If you think $99/month is a lot of money for web hosting, this gets us 1/3 to 1/2 of a 2GHz Pentium 4 server, and the OK to use up to 512MB of RAM.
The site is currently peaking at about 300MB RAM use at the moment (!) so this gives some margin for growth, without shutdowns. We also get 45GB Diskspace and 600GB Bandtwidth a month. Yes, that's 45 Gigabytes of web space. Enough for rather a lot of photos. :-)
If anyone would like some web space in return for a donation this could be a good way to bring in some money. We will also be looking to sell advertising or sponsorship of appropriate things on the Portal.
I have seriously considered setting up my own server, but I don't think I could handle the worry of having to install/maintain/backup/secure our own server on top of all the other things I'm doing. Quite frankly, the level of time and money commitment is not going down well with my wife and kids as it is. Vicky and the other volunteers are working very hard also, so we could really use more contributions of all sorts.
Thanks for reading,
Andy
Note: We're upgraded, please get posting again. Now, more than ever, we are relying on sales from our online shop to keep running.
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