Disclosure: A Few Forum Stats

Vaughn McMillan

Administrator
Staff member
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36,054
Location
ABQ NM
Hi All...

Normally, a post like this would be placed in the "Members Only" form that's visible to registered members only, but in this case, we thought it would be good to share a bit of info with both members and guests, so I'm putting it here in the Off-Topic forum instead.

Here are some numbers regarding our web hosting provider. Although this forum is still in its infancy, we still have a lot of room to grow, based on these numbers.

Here are our current stats, per 1&1 Internet:

Disk Space
21 MB of 200000.0 MB in use

Transfer Volume
4816 MB of 2000000.0 MB have been used (That's about 2 terabytes of data transfer available)

File Usage
1446 of 262144 files in use

I should note that the 2,000 GB of transfer volume we have available is per billing cycle, which is three months. We (Marty, actually) were invoiced recently for the period of 10/25/2006 to 01/25/2007. We are about 1/3 of the way through the cycle, and so far we've used 0.2% of our allotted bandwidth. If we keep this pace, we might use 0.75% of our bandwidth during this billing cycle. You read that right -- that's less than one percent. (BTW, the invoice was for $22.48, which reflects a 25% introductory offer. That's right...about $100 per year is what our web server costs us.)

Here's an overview of our "server". Check out the Flash movie. :thumb:

Also, for those who don't know, we pay $85 per year for the lease on the vBulletin software this forum runs on. So, our current operating costs are a bit under $200 per year at this point. Of course as we grow, these costs will rise, but as you can see from the numbers above, it looks like we still have some growing room at our current level. ;)

For any guests who are reading this, you should know that no one person owns this forum. This place is owned and operated by the members, and although individual members have stepped up to provide the money to get us started, our operating expenses will eventually be covered by voluntary donations from the members. (And of course the "seed money" will be reimbursed to the people who got things started.)

If you'd like to know more about how this forum operates, and would like to take part in the decision-making process here, please register for membership (it's free), and come join the fun.

- Vaughn
 
Transfer Volume
[/B]4816 MB of 2000000.0 MB have been used (That's about 2 terabytes of data transfer available)
...
I should note that the 2,000 GB of transfer volume we have available is per billing cycle, which is three months.

Vaughn, I have some friends who work at a web hosting company, so I've heard a few 'behind-the-scenes' commends and discussions. So the one question I would have is does this company oversell bandwidth?

ie, does the contract say that your bandwidth is UP TO 2 terabytes, or does it guarantee you the full 2 terabytes.

You see, what happens is that lots of customers don't use anywhere near their bandwidth, so companies like to then oversell their bandwidth. It lets them offer very attractive rates to people, and it also lets them get a lot of use out of the bandwidth that they pay for. For most customers, this works really well to their advantage. If they get the occaisional spike in bandwidth, they've got it covered, and things tend to average out.

The problem arises for people who consistently use up ALL their bandwidth. They don't usually do so well in a situation like that. Since they're using up all their bandwidth, there is no excess bandwidth available to work in the sharing arrangement.

just concerned for the future.
...art
 
art, i know nothing about computers/servers and the like, but looking at the link provided by vaughn alleviates any worries i have about the host not being able to provide the services required to host a lil` ol` woodworking forum.....tod
 
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