Phill needs our help....

[Martyn]

hey guys, I've been chatting with Phil before he went to work and the Bandwidth issue is really serious. Initially, we figured 1500mb per month would be plenty. much more than we were using before. But to put it in perspective, it took a.c.h.o nearly 2 months to get 1000 posts, we've done that in 3 days. The average throughput is currently running at around 400Mb/day and growing. That means we need something in the region of 12Gb month - ten times what we have now! OK, after the launch and all, things may slow down a little, but I think we have still seriously underestimated our needs. If we push 12Gb through this server, it's gonna cost Phil $100's/month in surcharges, thats if we move to a high usage tarrif.

We need a new, high badwidth, fast, unlimited, cheap server.

Can you guys check out any deals going? have a look round and see if you can find an offer that is suitable. We need to sort this quick. One option that Phil was looking at, was using an Infopop account like Ars' - but we'd loose our cool BB (not cheap either).

Cheers...

[pelligrini]

No ads please..

I'll pay not to have 'em.

[stall6g]

same here you'll drive people away with pop-ups. I think that a few of us can contribute a little towards the maintenance of the site.

[Dustin]

Originally posted by pelligrini
No ads please..

I'll pay not to have 'em.

I agree 100% here, I'll pay not to have any adds.

[Kevin]

I hope you can find something reasonably priced - I would hate to see this great board have to go to a subscription price model or something like that. :(

In the interim, if Phil can't get this sorted before he uses the monthly bandwidth limit, I'm prepared to cough up $10 or $20 to help cover his costs (just this once, not once per month). :D

I almost joined Picard once upon a time because of their great board, but this new one makes theirs look like cr@p. :cool:

[verT]

I'm with pelligrini, I'll pay not to have them

[ohms18k]

I'll help.

[kirek]

I set up a website for a friend here:
http://www.nomonthlyfees.com/prices_and_plans.htm

It's like $200 (US) startup and $70/year.
Details:
No adds (big plus)
200MB Webspace (enough?)
5000MB/month Bandwidth (see below)
MySQL and php support
server runs RedHat 6.2 (another plus)
and is at least 850MHz with 512MB RAM.
BUT (and this is a big one)... I don't know how many domains are hosted per server.
For the rest of the details follow above link.

Additional bandwidth is $50 per 5000MB, and if I read correctly it's not a monthly thing. It says if it take one month or 3 months to use the 5000MB it's still $50. I don't know if this is a better deal than what we have now, but it might be worth looking into.

I would be willing to help out with costs too.

Take it easy.

[Martyn]

Well guys, I'm 100% in agreement with the "no-adds" thing, and if it were only $10 or $20 a month, I'd throw that to him myself. The fact is, we've already exceeded our monthly allowance and at present rates, we'll be talking several $100 per month with this server. so we have to look for an alternative. It'll get sorted and I'm sure it won't be too much of a problem, but if you guys can check out deals, then between us, we should find something suitable. With the kind of ussage we are looking at, maybe small contribs could be sorted on a strictly voluntary basis. I think siggy mentioned this, with ref to something they used to do. Anyway, the point is, we can't expect Phil to stump up that kind of cash each month, so we need to find some alternative.

Thanks for your help.

[Martyn]

Originally posted by kirek
I set up a website for a friend here:
http://www.nomonthlyfees.com/prices_and_plans.htm

It's like $200 (US) startup and $70/year.
Details:
No adds (big plus)
200MB Webspace (enough?)
5000MB/month Bandwidth (see below)


Kirek, that's much more like it :D That may be enough, but keep looking guys, see if we can improve on this :)
tnx

[Daniel, Laura, and Nora]

I'll happily cough up a wad. Hit me up quick before I head to Costa Rica on a hard-earned vacation, else wait until August!
:D
Daniel

[Rick_Deadly]

Originally posted by tril0Byte
Can you guys check out any deals going? have a look round and see if you can find an offer that is suitable. We need to sort this quick. One option that Phil was looking at, was using an Infopop account like Ars' - but we'd loose our cool BB (not cheap either).

Cheers...

This is not a solution... but an idea for a solution. As everybody knows, the Genome@home product is being hosted by Stanford University. The resulting data is freely available to all people (Including other universities.). Out of all the Universities in North America, there must be a few that could (And would be willing.) to give us free website hosting for our BB and website, in order to promote this genome project.

Do we have anyone eloquent enough to E-mail a bunch of Universities and ask them for thier services?

The types of places that would be most receptive are Biology and Sciences departments like this:
http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~abcs/ and this:
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/bio/

You never know :)

[wbierman]

I'm checking into collocation in Oakland. $300 Setup fee. $300 per month for 1/4 rack space. Redundant T3s with a direct ATM connection to the PacBell NAP. I know that is a lot per month but so far as I know there is no limit on daily or monthly bandwidth! (Have requested a quote to make sure)

I'm sure with all our members we could scrape up our own box or boxes for redundancy. This service comes with 2 IPs. I personally have a pool of 4 IPs that are available. Memory is very cheap right now so building a killer box would not cost a fortune.

I could donate an Intel Server Adapter...

If we had 100 active users = $3 per month There is the monthly fee.

Comments?

____________________
-will

[Martyn]

That's one very cool idea Rick. I'll give it a go, for sure. My old Uni might be receptive, I still keep in touch with a couple of the IT guys, I'll give it a shout. The thing is, selling something like that to a Uni is likely to take a while. We dont have a while, so we gotta come up with something a little sooner.

Cheers

[Martyn]

Will, gotta love the sound of that bandwidth :D

Problem though, ppl might be put off joining (or staying) if they thought there were fee's involved. Personally, I'd rather bung a wad at a 1 off yearly fee. Something along the cost lines of kirek's idea is probably going to sit better with most folks. Hell, I could find that myself. Low impact :) Maybe we can find a halfway house, really though, the cheapper the better.

[zhotfire]

I'm more than willing to kick in a few dollars for the Collective. Kirek's idea sounds very promising. The universities may not be that receptive, as many already have bandwidth problems, but you never know... it's worth a shot. I'll bounce the idea off the guys here at Dalhousie in Halifax. I'll have to see what kind of pipe they have connected.... ;)

[wbierman]

How about a once a year $40 chunck?

I see a single issue with a "free" university.... what is their priority if something goes wrong? I have found that you get what you pay for....

More details:

Customer Space

19" x 84" EIA standard open equipment racks
22"W x 34"D x 84"H locking louvered door cabinets
8'W x 6'D locking cages
Larger square footage and private space plans available

Security Monitoring Systems

24x7 Card Key access control to facility
24x7 Biometric Palm Scanner to colocation floor
Multi-location, high-resolution color cameras covering building entrances, hallways, and all quadrants of the colocation space.
72 Hour multiplex recording of all security cameras
24 Hour centralized monitoring of HVAC, Temperature, Fire, UPS, PDU

Power Supply

One 20 amp 120vac Isolated Ground power strip per rack or cabinet
Three 20 amp 120vac Isolated Ground power strips per cage.
Liebert Data Center UPS with PDU and Bypass Transfer switching
900Kw diesel generator backup for 200% of customer load
24 hour fuel supply with telco priority one refuel status

HVAC

Carrier split system with four unit supply
200% capability @ 68 degrees with full occupancy

Customer Service

Test bench set up area with network connections
Direct outside phone
Customer workstation with web access


____________________
-will

[Bruce]

Originally posted by Daniel, Laura, and Nora
I'll happily cough up a wad. Hit me up quick before I head to Costa Rica on a hard-earned vacation, else wait until August!
:D
Daniel

I just got back from C.R.

Really nice place!

[phil]

WOW, I have just come in from a busy night shift and wasn't expecting this thread!!

tril0Byte is right though, we do have a problem. Current figures are 1130Mb of useage over 3 days. I figure today will take us very close to the limit. I have spoken to my host and they charge an extra $10 per 1000Mb of traffic per month. They also have 2 deals...4Gb traffic for $25 per month and 6.5Gb traffic for $45 per month. My guestimate is we need about 12Gb per month and with the current host will cost a fortune. I am going to grab 2000Gb more traffic and see how the useage goes while I look for a new home for the board. This should give us about 5 days to sort something.

For now, can I ask ppl not to press F5 or reload pages - instead use the links on the page to navigate forums. If you want to refresh the main forum list, just click the team logo in the top leaft corner of the screen. By reloading the page, you are forcing the server to re-send everything on the page. By following the links, your browser cache will be used to grab the graphics and only the changes on the page will be sent from the server. The biggest useage on bandwidth is the images...all of the buttons, logos, smilies etc. By using your cache, you will save a lot of bandwidth.

One of the solutions I was thinking of was the Infopop Open Topic (http://www.infopop.com/business/business_ot.html) system. The board will be hosted at Infopop and they will look after everything from installing the latest software to backing up the forum. They charge by pageviews per month and not actual traffic. The basic package costs $220 per year, but allows 25,000 page views per month. Currently, we have had 500 page views in 3 days. Using the Infopop system, we should easily be covered. This is the BB that arstechnica uses. It is not a subsription service although ars does charge extra for extra services to paying members (like custom titles etc). Ads are not used unless the customer asks or requires them.

My other choice is finding a host who will provide MySQL, PHP4, CGI and high/unlimited bandwidth useage for a decent fee. Could you keep your eyes peeled for such a dream host when you are surfing please?

Thanks....I will keep you updated.

[Alfred Das]

Maybe in the meantime we could refrain from using avatars? Would this make a real difference?
Or we could post less of course. ;)
Or quit proposing daft ideas like mine here! LOL

A:\

[Martyn]

Originally posted by Alfred Das
Maybe in the meantime we could refrain from using avatars? Would this make a real difference?
Or we could post less of course. ;)
Or quit proposing daft ideas like mine here! LOL

A:\

No, definitely don't posk less, we'll sort it - keep em comming :)

[Chas]

Get one of those Pay button thingys up on the site damn fast so we can all help out with the cost

Its the fairest way we cannot let this fail now, too many people would like to see it happen.......

[phil]

Don't worry Chas, I will NOT let this fail...I have another server sorted with 30Gb per month traffic and 500Mb of webspace. This will leave us enough room to grow and keep the forum with all of the eye candy on.

[Chas]

Great news Phil

But i still think it's only fair for us all to contribute :)

[Virus]

You can contribute, "BUY ANOTHER TBIRD". Leave the cost up to the moderators.

[Chas]

Would love to but i haven't paid for this one yet......

that comes in November :(

[fury]

An idea that may reduce load on the server for now is to turn off showing vB code Quick links in your Edit Options.

It removes the vB code link row from the posting page, as well as killing off the clickable smilies.

As for a new web host, I recommend one of OLM's hosting packages (http://olm.net/pages/web_hosting/gen_prices.html)

XiBase (http://www.xibase.com/) is hosted with them, and so far we've had no server related problems.

They are cheap ($20/mo for starter package, $30/mo for personal plan), fast, and reliable, have PHP4, MySQL, CGI, from 25 to unlimited POP accounts depending on which package you get, and even a java based chat (the starter package's chat is not very robust, however)

[Martyn]

We've got it sorted guys, like Phil says, we've a new server with 30Gb/month bandwidth, enough for all the eyecandy set to lush ;)

We'll be moving in a few days, in the meantime, the bandwidth allowance on this server has been increased - post like maniac's.

Re cost, the mods are gonna pick up the tab - are we good to you or what :)

[verT]

You guys rock! :cool:

[Dave S]

Originally posted by tril0Byte
........Re cost, the mods are gonna pick up the tab - are we good to you or what :)

Man 2 good:D but if we can help in any way just shout OK;)

[Chas]

Thats really great news

but any financial help required let us all know cause we are the best and we deserve the best :D

[X-Calibur]

Is it a bird?
Is it a plane?

Noooooooo, it's X-Calibur

Yikes, what a lousy introduction... anyway...

I know that since the meltdown many will fear the place where Excalibur's server was located.... so I will bring to your attention that the old ACHO board failure was due to software issues, meaning that the Ikonboard code is responsible... no shame since it's free....

I don't know what kinda Webspace you need Phil...
Here's an example from my Web Host (Sherweb)

Unix - Plan 1 ===» that's what I have.
**********
10 Meg web space
2 POP accounts
UNLIMITED BANDWITH
Aliases
Frontpage
FTP
Stats
CGI
PHP 3.0, Perl 5, SSI
No charge technical support
50 CAD set up fee (i.e. 23.31 GBP or 32.84 USD)
10.95 CAD per month

***** Probably not enouht *****
Let's skip to Plan 4
all the above
unlimited POP accounts (meaning we could get our own @thegenomecollective e-mail...)
+ MySQL
Setup 100 CAD
99.95 CAD per month (first month free)

Those are on Unix servers... (Apache)

There are other offers on Win NT servers...

www.sherweb.com

Just trying to push my two cents here...

X-Calibur

[Martyn]

Thanks X' - check into the mod lounge, we've done the deal with a nice option :)

[phil]

Thanks for the offer X, but we have it covered :) Here's the specs:

500Mb of web space
30Gb traffic per month
PHP4 (needed for this board)
MySQL (5 databases)
CGI
SSI
SSL
Dual Pentium III machines with 1 Gig of RAM, running Red Hat Linux and Apache Web Server (I wonder if we can get Genome running on these?)
etc, etc, etc, etc..........


We should never have to upgrade this account :D

[dnar]

We should never have to upgrade this account











Aren't you fogetting something? :D

[verT]

Phil no you didn't say that! We'll have to upgrade next month:D That sound's like a sweet setup. Again let us members know if we can help out with some bucks!

[phil]

Originally posted by dnar
We should never have to upgrade this account



Aren't you fogetting something? :D




Maybe I need to adjust the post flooding filter on your account dnar - may not post more than once in 5 minutes should do :D

[fury]

Originally posted by fury
An idea that may reduce load on the server for now is to turn off showing vB code Quick links in your Edit Options.

It removes the vB code link row from the posting page, as well as killing off the clickable smilies.

Another thought to reduce bandwidth consumption: Do you guys have gzip capability on this server?

[Martyn]

Originally posted by fury


Another thought to reduce bandwidth consumption: Do you guys have gzip capability on this server?

Yes, it's running. Hopefully, on the new server, we wont need to compress anything. 30Gb should be enuff, even for this team ;)

[fury]

Alrighty :)

BTW, I'm fury from OCN. flurffy in genome.

Now get down on our deck and start swabbin', matey! :D

[wbierman]

Remember, capacity planing is never close to actual use. Take for example Ellis Island. They thought they had enough bandwidth with plenty to spare. When it went live it was only off by 50 million people trying to log on!

Just a thought....


____________________
-will

[Martyn]

Originally posted by fury
Alrighty :)

BTW, I'm fury from OCN. flurffy in genome.

Now get down on our deck and start swabbin', matey! :D

We're doubling your output man - you'll be lucky to stay on our decks ;)

[Nofinger]

:curtsymodeon:
To all the Mod's, you're A Great:cool: bunch off guy's for doing all of this for the TEAM
:/curtsymodeoff:

But if you'll ever nead some coins, don't hesitate and give us a call.
We have the pleasure of this forum so also the sorrow:D

[wylie]

Yeah man.....anyone need a contribution just ask.....dnar drop us a line if you have any team expenses and I'll drop the cash over...split 'em if you like.
dont make this a pay site.....you'll find we'll donate enough voluntarily!

[dnar]

Thanks guys, thanks wylie. It's just been astounding the way everyone has bandied together on this team, well done everyone. It is truly amazing the talent, skills, support, freindship, good will, etc etc etc. If only the real world was like this.........

The very last thing anyone wanted was to make this a "pay" forum. The whole idea is to attract new members, so keeping it fee and advetising free is the answer. We have it covered though, just enjoy and keep posting! .....catch me if you can :D

[siggy]

Originally posted by tril0Byte
Well guys, I'm 100% in agreement with the "no-adds" thing, and if it were only $10 or $20 a month, I'd throw that to him myself. The fact is, we've already exceeded our monthly allowance and at present rates, we'll be talking several $100 per month with this server. so we have to look for an alternative. It'll get sorted and I'm sure it won't be too much of a problem, but if you guys can check out deals, then between us, we should find something suitable. With the kind of ussage we are looking at, maybe small contribs could be sorted on a strictly voluntary basis. I think siggy mentioned this, with ref to something they used to do. Anyway, the point is, we can't expect Phil to stump up that kind of cash each month, so we need to find some alternative.

Thanks for your help.

We used PAYPAL on SDL.

[Nofinger]

Originally posted by dnar
just enjoy and keep posting! .....catch me if you can :D

I....C...a...n....t....,....d...o...n....'....t... .h...a...v.....e..
..a....O....'...C...E...D.......K.....e...y...b... o...a...r...d...l...i...k...e...
....Y...o...u.....:D :D :D

[siggy]

.....catch me if you can


__________________
dnar



I am trying. You just have more hours in the day, down under than I do.