Reducing Bandwidth

[QUAZAR]

Just a though, but as bandwidth costs money, any way of reducing the amount of data through your server should save money on forum running costs.

I know you have the option to upload photos and host them on the PL server. This is obviously where most of the band width goes. If all photos were hosted externally (Photobucket etc) and the link embedded it should cut down on the server capacity and hopefully save some running costs.

To the reader, there is no difference, as the photo is still there and it would also remove that annoying delay when you click on an embedded thumbnail while you wait for the picture to load.

Just a thought, but another forum I use (6K members) does this and halved their monthly costs.

[badger1666]

dont know if that would go down well with paying members
but there are alot of guests using this site would be good if non member bandwidth
could be restricted

[White-Light]

I don't see why hosting photos externally would make any difference to subscribers.

Photobucket delete theirs quite quickly but imageshack leave them up for more or less whilst ever the link is in existence.

Admin might choose to still host ilda files etc but leave photo and video to external links. That could save a lot of bandwidth and cost for no real detriment to users. For video there's Youtube or Vimeo. Fo photo there are many providers.

[badger1666]

oh i get it now see what you mean did not think of stuff like that.
i think the one that would save a lot would be that the pl ftp is restricted
to members only. at the moment it open to the whole world

[LaNeK779]

i have been using imageshack on other forums and the photos stay there for ever.
so it is a good idea

[QUAZAR]

Same with Photobucket. I have stuff thats been there for about 8 years.

[-bart-]

I would suggest restricting download of attachments to those who are logged in.
If I interpret the numbers right, 75% of the visitors are not logged in.

If these visitors choose not to contribute to the community, then why offer them access to "our" content.

[buffo]

The last time Robert and I talked about this, he admitted that the bandwidth charges are *not* the major expense of running PhotonLexicon. Rather, it's the incredible load placed on the back-end database server. Everything is stored in the database, and every time you get served a page, the DB server is crunching away feeding the content to the web server. Plus, when people search PL, the server has to really work it's ass off to sort through all the posts and give you an answer in under a second. That takes some serious horsepower, and it's the limiting factor for just about everything related to the cost (and the scalability) of the forum.

Spec has had to upgrade the class of hardware that the forum runs on several times. It started out as one site of literally dozens that were all hosted out of a single box at a service provider. Then he had to upgrade to a dedicated virtual server. Now he's seriously thinking about a no-shit real server just for PL. That is, a single machine (we're talking enterprise-class hardware here, not just some desktop PC) that does nothing but run PL... (Yeah, it's that big!)

You would be astonished to see the log files for a typical month of PL usage. True, the bandwidth is high, but the back-end server stuff is really shocking. There's a shitload of work going on in the background every time the forum serves you a page. (That's one reason why our beloved Admin is so busy behind the scenes; there's a lot of stuff going on that he needs to keep an eye on.)

Adam

PS: If Spec ever did decide to encourage people to use other sites to host pictures, I would hope he'd suggest imgur instead of photobucket or imageshack. Imgur has no bandwidth restrictions, while the other two do.

[-bart-]

Then I would suggest restrict (advanced)search or other db intensive functionality to members who are logged in.

(said the non-dark-blue member)

[buffo]

Yeah, but that really hurts the usability of the forums. Guests come here looking for information. And typically they end up signing up once they see how great this place is, and how much information is available.

But if they had to sign up before they could search for their answers, they might not bother. So I can see why Robert allows guests to search. (Though to discourage abuse by bots, guests have to answer a question before each search: They need to define one of the letters in the word "laser".)\

Also, there is a limit of sorts placed on images that are hosted on the forums... You have to be logged in to view them. Of course, if you have the image hosted somewhere else, it will be visible for everyone, but if you select "host file locally" when you add an image, then it will only be visible to members who are logged in. So guests can't see them.

Adam