Williamsclio host

[Gav]

banners and spammy and cheap imo

Northy doesnt need banners, the site isnt strapped for cash, it ran out of bandwidth, so? ALL FORUMS do, it's one of them things.

[northy]

Unfortunalty it is a bit more complicated that that. For those who want to know.

Beteen march 2007 - march 2008 the forum hosting is indeed free due to a major loss of information we suffered in 2006. This was a way of compensation offered to us by our providers.

We pay £200 a year for our hosting. We are on a 30gig bandwidth limit.

Once we go over 30gig the site shuts. As u have found out. To open the site up again i have to buy more bandwidth.

Our provider sells bandwith at £10 a gig. For some idea how quick we can go though this £40 (4 gig) lasts only 24 hours. Although we get a free year we have paid everymonth bar jan for extra bandwith. AT GREAT COST !

The catch comes here guys. Our provider can only give us extra bandwidth 5 times in a year. Which we have had. After this he says its unfair to his other customers who suffer a slower service because we take it all. So no more bandwidth = no more forum until the end of the month. I carnt be having that as your membership covers the cost of running the forum.

In May - i added £80 bandwidth to see us through...which is a stupid waste imo but i had to do it. I am currenlty looking to swap so we never have to worry about bandwidth again.

So its not just a simple as it sounds....wc has been with the current providers for 2.5 years....but we have out grown them unfortunalty.

[northy]

the package last year was so poor the guy gave northy a year/18 month free package.. i said it then, il say it again. f*k him off and get a decent server, even if it means you have to pay for it rather than get it gratis

Your bang on there jon.

This will be done ASAP

[simonr85]

so how much bandwith would you need Northy? to see you through an extremely busy month?


would 300gig per month be sufficient?

[simonr85]

and how big is your database? smaller than 50MB?

[Robb]

so how much bandwith would you need Northy? to see you through an extremely busy month?


would 300gig per month be sufficient?

It says that he currently uses 30 to 40 GB a month

[simonr85]

i can get 300gig bandwith on my hosting a month for £5 neva runs out

[Robb]

Maybe so but you've got to look at a forum better. Just 'cause it has a lot of badwidth doesnt mean it'll work for this site. A forum uses a lot of CPU power and as a result it bogs down other peoples hosting packages. Most Hosts wont allow that and would do something about it.

[Daz]

At £5/month including "300GB", I daren't even think about how many customers they need to make it break even, let alone make any money.. Heh.
Infact, bandwidth just isn't that cheap, let alone servers, rack space, power usage, maintenence, support contracts, etc.. at least in the UK (which is quite important if your main audience is UK based).

Good transit is important, good power uptime, solid infrastructure, all come at a cost..

At £5, you're business model is based on pure volume rather than adding value to your current client base. It works, definetly.. and it definetly has it's place.

I know WilliamsClio isn't *THAT* large, but, even on shared hosting, people are going to get a bit upset, as there would still be significant database activity etc..

Not sure what sort of database load you're seeing here, but peak times, ClioSport hits 120+ queries per second to the database.. the post table alone has 2.5million+ rows, so you can imagine the sort of load it generates.

As the database gets larger here, and usage increases, you're going to need some sort of solution in place to grow.

Anyway, that's my view..

Good luck :D

[Daz]

(Just to add, I know ClioSport is larger, but what I'm saying is, database load increases signficantly with users.. and in order to grow, you need to be able to cope with it.)

Remember, a single refresh of the main page may generate many queries.. ClioSport can generate like, 12 queries per page! Not sure what phpBB is like in this department though