hosting probs Options

[m33amkii]

i was reading somewhere that the sneakymonkeys.com is getting overloaded, hence it was going down so often last month. i was thinking i do have a web server at home where one could host the site temporarily until the website is hosted someplace else. my only problem is bandwith of course, but if the battlerecorder demos are saved to sneakymonkeys.com and the forums on the local pc, that might be an option

cheers
c

[MonkeyFiend]

thanks for the offer I've also got a DL385 knocking around at home (!) but since my internet connection is sketchy at the best of times I couldn't host there.

The main problem is bandwidth - the website, battlerecorder even people connecting to the server (where the server graphic is loaded from the website etc.,) create bandwidth. The webhosts allow a fast connection to upload stuff (well 10mbps) - a typical UK connection while being 8mb/16mb down is still probably less than 0.5 for uploading. This means at the end of each round the server would lag harshly as it tries to FTP the battlerecorder files to a site hosted on a home connection. (it would lag everything up for about 3-5 minutes)

For usage stats, speaking of january (including various downtime), we had:

Total Hits 919021
Total Files 619816
Total Pages 266289
Total Visits 8125
Total KBytes 15945178

Total Unique Sites 17364
Total Unique URLs 1119
Total Unique Referrers 406
Total Unique Usernames 1
Total Unique User Agents 435

Basically 16gb per month traffic in and out.

While more reliable hosts exist, for out purposes they need a fat pipe for battlerecorder, high uptime and need to be cheap. I can find plenty of hosts that can offer uptime/bandwidth but the charges for them are extreme. Also some webhosts won't allow battlerecorder content.

There's some other funny requirements, such as SSL certificates for the shop, php4.7, php5, MySQL, etc., but this is all fairly minor in lieu of bandwidth.

As a side note, to reduce bandwitdh the site is load balanced across 2 domains (kind of like a web cluster) but I may revise this as I suspect if one domain fails it takes the other offline meaning we are twice as likely to suffer downtime.

Any suggestions or comments, give us a shout

MonkeyFiend