Hosting PF & PS

# It costs about $3,000 per year to host PF / PS, including colocation fees, vBulletin licenses and so on. I've paid this myself, mostly because I couldn't face giving up totally. But, I'm going to have to make some money here because I can't keep on otherwise.
# There are cheaper ways to host, but most involve shared boxes, and that means slo-o-ow forum response during the busy season.

I work in IT consulting, my clients have included citi, jp morgan, goldman, etc. I strongly disagree with this analysis of hosting vs. colo. You should be able to host this site for $600/year or less with no appreciable difference in performance or availability. I've been using cybrhost as a webhost for our wine site (www.pjwine.com) for the last 7 years. They are extremely knowledgeable, performance is great and for around $20 per month, you should be good to go.

I'm willing to help you transition the site if you like.

welcome back,
jd

Hi JD;

Thanks for taking an interest in the hosting costs I face here. If it is possible to achieve lower costs and better performance, obviously that would be worth looking into further.

However, I'm not sure whether your comparison with www.pjwine.com is on target or not. As you can see here:

http://www.statsaholic.com/poolforum...com+pjwine.com

both PF and Poolsolutions individually experience traffic averages during May, June, July and Aug that are almost an order of magnitude greater that pjwine's average traffic . . . and of course BOTH sites are hosted on this server.

Please keep in mind that the averages you see reflect traffic on inactive and unmaintained websites. Also, since all the traffic at PF is dynamic pages, many of which are actively changing, the CPU load is distinct from what might be experienced on a site with more static data. There is some reason to suppose that traffic will increase if I am, as the mods and I hope, able to actively maintain and organize the sites over the next several months.

And, as you know, moving the site to a hosting solution that was inadequate would be less than ideal, especially since my colo rates for a 4U server are very much 'grandfathered' and would not be available if I left and then tried to return.

Thanks again for your interest.

PoolDoc.

PS: This is a bit off topic for this forum section, so I'll spin this off into the Odds and Ends section.

After reflection, I thought it might be appropriate to extend this a bit.


Update (June 22): people are confusing page views and hits. PF pageviews are running 400,000/month as noted below. "Hits" are running about (I just checked the logs) about 6,000,000 / month. Most of sites folks have mentioned, as comparable, are actually a small fraction of that.


On occasion, I have gotten offers to help with the hosting, coding, or development of the Pool Forum and the server on which it resides. The value of those offers has been often limited by lack of information about the Pool Forum. For obvious reasons, I don't want to share everything, but I think I can share things that might help those offering assistance focus their efforts.

Much of my knowledge about what's available from various hosts is 'stale'. Those with current experience may be able to correct me. But often the offers I receive reflect experience with much lower traffic sites, which makes me uncertain of how that advice would 'scale'.

The Pool Forum (poolforum.com) is the daughter site of Pool Solutions (poolsolutions.com). I don't use any formal site metrics tools, but external tracking suggests that the sites together receive over 100,000 unique visitors per month during peak months (May, June, July, August)., and well over 600,000 page views. PoolSolutions pages are almost all static, but the most viewed Pool Forum pages are not only served dynamically, but cannot be cached because of frequent changes. It is my understanding that few if any shared hosting solutions are able to support a dynamic page view rate of 400,000+ pages / month, plus 200,000+ static page views.

Corresponding bandwidth requirements are in the 30 to 50 Gbyte/month range, but we expect them to increase substantially as we enable some of the photo, community, and social features for subscribers. Storage requirements are currently trivial, but again, will increase as we enable those features.

The software environment is pure LAMP: Slackware Linux, Apache, MySQL, & PHP.

The Iptables firewall was hand coded by me in Bash. Currently, I could use help from someone who has successfully implemented Iptables firewalls using Ipsets to enable dynamic response to various issues. Where practical, traffic from bogons and from non-English speaking IP blocks in RIPE, LACNIC, and APNIC is blocked. Traffic from those areas, even where the user is a legitimate English speaking pool owner, leads to confusion on the Forum when questions are asked. Differences in piping, electrical supplies, available chemicals, and pool equipment mean that US based advice is really not applicable to most non-US locations, Australia being an exception. Ideally, the firewall would be updated to allow access to PoolSolutions worldwide, and block access only the Pool Forum.

The Sendmail mail server does a variety of mail forwarding tasks, as well as supporting all the Forum email functions. Because of the volume of notifications and such, the email function is critical. In the past (distant past in Internet terms), shared servers, at least with the ISP's investigated, did not support this well. Even in the current shrunken state of the Pool Forum, mail volume runs to a 1,000 emails per day or more. The problem here is not load on the Sendmail function, but access to a server allowing such outflow, especially where clean up tasks may involve sending to a large number of dead email addresses.

The forum software is the latest patch of vBulletin 3.8. I'm purchased the 4.0 license, but downgraded till I can get on the new server, since 4.0 is 'heavier' than 3.8 AND less familiar. Annual licensing run around $250, in order to receive all patches.

For obvious reasons, it's not prudent to discuss how administrative access to the server is established.

The server currently is an old 1.4 Ghz Athlon with 1 GByte RAM. Current loads run 60 - 85% during peak periods. We anticipate that the current server will NOT be adequate in the week prior to July 4th, when user loads are likely to peak seasonally. The new server will be Slackware running on dual core 2.6 GHz Athlon with 3 Gbyte RAM. It's just a consumer grade Compaq with a multi-speed low power Athlon and with upgraded fans, power supply and drives. Once everything is in place, I want to look at installing one of the PHP accelerators. I would welcome the chance to talk to anyone with practical experience with this.

The next step, to the best of my knowledge, in improving capacity would be to install a RAID6 disk array with MDADM. This could be done with the existing server, but would probably be more practical with a new server. However, a RAID array are future projects that would depend on how the Pool Forum does financially this season, and what load levels look like after a PHP accelerator is in place.

Optimizing MySQL is something I know almost nothing about. I have no idea whether my current setup, which is configured for data safety rather than speed, could be significantly improved.

There. That's it for now.

Ben
"PoolDoc"

Ben's email asked for any suggestions on the forums as far as moderating posts and such.

I was a site admin for a social club that I was a part of and we used the following software:

1) Raven Nuke - php website software
2) phpBB - forum software within Raven Nuke. Common Forum Software
3) Nuke Sentinal - Monitoring/Encryption software used to prevent hackers and secure server.

All of this is free software. We had real problems with spammers and hackers prior to switching our server from phpNuke to Raven Nuke, but after switching, we had no issues.

I know that vbulletin is the forum software of choice, but it's expensive. phpBB with RavenNuke (at least in my experience) is pretty safe, easy to use, and FREE!! Also, RavenNuke requires authentication with each login via a random word generator.

You can utilize ad banners and such with Raven Nuke and it is very customizable. I'd let you view our site, but that club has folded and the site is no longer active.

If this is something that you all would/could be interested in, let me know, and I can provide more details. If not, just disregard, but I thought I'd offer the suggestion.

Doc,

You have save me a few bucs ove the years so I'll give you some advice.

$3k for hosting is absurd. That is the kind of premimum service that IBM charges for hosting major department store sites. You can get a premimum eCom site from Rackspace for under $500/month and they charge as much as anyone.

If you are getting 600k hits a month, Google AdSense alone should be paying you several hundred a day.

If you really are in such financial straits and your sites gets as many hits as you claim, find a good business manager asap. There is NO reason you should not be able to retire and let this site pay for a premo lifestyle.

Well, it's going to get buried under all these messages (and might well should) but I should note that as someone who runs three different forums on many different hosts, there are FAR cheaper solutions than what Ben is paying for this forum, and they still maintain very nice response time (the best in the business) from external hosts using quality software.

I pay around $150 a year for all three of my forums (and could easily add more, even including this one if Ben does go under and any of the super mods want). And, yes, I was paying the big bucks as Ben was until I started investigating all of this.

For sure the forum overhead could be reduced greatly and that might help things on his other fronts. But I won't mention it again (you guys all have my email and a way to contact me privately if you want more info).

Oh -- and I'll add that I'm happy he's back, I enjoy this forum, it's helped me a lot.

Hi PoolDoc,

I don't know if this has been covered as I just logged on for the time in a LONG, LONG time after getting an email that you're back, and there are 15 pages of replies so I haven't read them all.

If you're paying $3k a year for hosting, then you really need to contact me.

Not all shared hosting is the same. There are some companies out there that have massive shared servers that could handle this forum no problem. I know because I work for one of the biggest. I'm not soliciting here as I don't get paid anything to refer customers I'm just a tech. But we have customers with thousands of more users and tens of thousands of more visits and page views that PF has ever had that are being hosted on a $24.95/month hosting plan and they get 2-3 second page load times. And it includes free backups and cPanel control panel. You can do your own backups through cPanel but the hosting company does free weekly backups. You can also get a VPS (virtual private server) for $50/month. Dedicated servers are around $150/month. The size and number of users and visitors to this site does not warrant $3k/year, if you're paying that much. I only say this because I can help you if you want (for free of course).

Shared hosting is not what it used to be. RAM, CPU and hard drive has gotten to the point where it's bigger and faster than anything you can throw at it..... cloud based hosting is cheap now (dozens of servers all hooked up to act as one). You can ZERO benefits and no more security colocating than you do with shared/vps/dedicated server hosting.

Yes you can get some crappy shared hosting, but either someone is taking advantage of you for co-location or you haven't checked around in awhile. Colo with more bandwidth you can use can be had for $99/month now-a-days.

VB is nothing special and there are free forum software out there that is just as secure as VB. SMF and phpbb3 are the two most common bulletin board software out there and has a ton more users between the two than VB has.

PM if you want to know more and I'll move your site and convert it over and save you a TON of money.

Sounds interesting. Some of the other suggestions seemed to be coming from folks operating on a different scale than PF is now, much less on the scale we hope to go to.

I'll be in touch, Rastoma.

Ben