vpsBoard advertisements and availability

[D. Strout]

All ad spots reserved.

Nice! You were certainly right about this being a steady, sure source of income from the site. But on that note, I've been running the numbers, and am having trouble seeing how the amount needed to run this site could come anywhere near the $1,120/month you will receive from these ads. Let's break it down:

5 VPSes - being generous and figuring $10/mo each, that's $50. $1120 - $50 = $1,070.

IPB license - $25 semi-annual renewal, divided by 6 is about $4.10. $1,070 - $4.10 = $1,065 (rounding down)

Some plugins - Hard to quantify this, but let's just be generous and say 10 plugins at $30 each makes $300. Brings us down to $765.

OK. $765. You're not going to be feeding a family on that, but that's still a fair number of 2GB KVMs at $7/mo. So what does that leave us with? Either:

1. I ran the numbers wrong
2. A rather large amount of development will go in to the site
3. You, @MannDude, get some pocket change

To be honest, I'm fine with any of the above. But in the case of #3, I do expect you to be straightforward about that.

 

[drmike]

Congrats @MannDude for the pre-sales.   

Thanks to the providers who stepped up.

@D. Strout, lets see...

1. VPSes.   Unsure what the costs are (not my business) - but as-is the costs are certainly above $50 a month.  

Running the site on VPSes and current architecture leaves something to be desired.  Highly fragmented, no control over resources (i.e. resource contention).

Short term, more VPSes will be added for things.  Longer term, vpsBoard will move to dedicated resources with higher level of control.

2. Licensing of software to date has been minimal due to lack of any income (i.e. MannDude has pulled funds out of his pocket from amongst the more prevalent lint found therein).  Certainly will be more software purchases, more licensing (maybe) and I suspect customization/programming.

3. The site is ran by a core team (MannDude, Pie, Martin)  and those guys pour lots of time into babysitting us here.  Dealing with dust ups, splitting threads, fielding requests, etc.   In fairness, they all deserve something for their efforts, or inevitably, we'll lose their interest and free time cycles to other things.

4. Any business needs a safety cushion.   MannDude should recoup his costs and there onward, something should get put aside for savings.  For things that come up or have to be done.

5.  MannDude intends on using some of the funding to create promotions/giveaways.  This will include member giveaways and in my opinion should expand to advertising vpsBoard via other places to  keep visible in the industry.

Probably a lot more the official team can share on things.

 

[Francisco]

Far as I know he's also planning to pay for advertisements on some key markets he may know to help bring in new people, not just fight with LE over the same userbase.

Francisco

 

[drmike]

No reason to fight over LE user base.  The nature of vpsBoard isn't pigeonholed into the loss leader < $7 offers.

I know @MannDude has talked about paying for some sponsored content also. How-to's and Tutorials are the priority.  So that's another place the investments will be going back into generating more for the community.

 

[MannDude]

Nice! You were certainly right about this being a steady, sure source of income from the site. But on that note, I've been running the numbers, and am having trouble seeing how the amount needed to run this site could come anywhere near the $1,120/month you will receive from these ads. Let's break it down:

5 VPSes - being generous and figuring $10/mo each, that's $50. $1120 - $50 = $1,070.

IPB license - $25 semi-annual renewal, divided by 6 is about $4.10. $1,070 - $4.10 = $1,065 (rounding down)

Some plugins - Hard to quantify this, but let's just be generous and say 10 plugins at $30 each makes $300. Brings us down to $765.

OK. $765. You're not going to be feeding a family on that, but that's still a fair number of 2GB KVMs at $7/mo. So what does that leave us with? Either:

1. I ran the numbers wrong
2. A rather large amount of development will go in to the site
3. You, @MannDude, get some pocket change

To be honest, I'm fine with any of the above. But in the case of #3, I do expect you to be straightforward about that.

Good questions.

What Buffalooed and Fran has pointed is true, but also I've considered (but am not deadset) that moving vpsBoard to the east coast USA would come with some performance increase for the overall visitor base.

• United States
• United Kingdom
• India
• Australia
• Canada

That is (in order) where most of our traffic comes from. Mainly US/UK. I love BuyVM, the service has been solid but Las Vegas probably isn't the most ideal location for targeting this audience. Unfortunately the east coast has little affordable DDoS protection options. If I were to move the site elsewhere, I'd likely get a larger server than needed for right now just to prevent having to update/upgrade/move again in the future as well as DDoS protection. This would either be a GRE tunnel to CNServers, which probably would be wonky for routing being on the other side of the country ( and not cheap ) or utilize CloudFlare's $200/mo DDoS protection. Still, there is money left over.

I've toyed with the idea of having some paid content contributions, namely in the tutorials section. This brings in traffic from Google when people search for particular things, and there are a few members who have been very active in contributing there. I'd love to be able to reward them for their effort.

Contests! Prizes!

Will I earn some money from all of this to? Sure. How much? I don't know, whatever is left over I suppose. I want to give Don and Martin some cash for their efforts here as they're a tremendous help and not just sit by idly and let them work for free like moderators might in other communities (That's not a jab at LET, even WHT mods are unpaid and that place brings in crazy money).

EDIT: Also, how would you feel about an unbiased, non-provider ran VPS offers site that doesn't promote their own customers more than others? Would that be good for the industry? I think so.

 

[Francisco]

Backhauling from CN won't improve your latency, it'll make it worse since it has to go to the east coast.

Remember, we are getting filtering on the east coast soon

Francisco

 

[drmike]

That is (in order) where most of our traffic comes from. Mainly US/UK. I love BuyVM, the service has been solid but Las Vegas probably isn't the most ideal location for targeting this audience. Unfortunately the east coast has little affordable DDoS protection options. If I were to move the site elsewhere, I'd likely get a larger server than needed for right now just to prevent having to update/upgrade/move again in the future as well as DDoS protection.

You do realize BuyVM is opening up DDoS protect / filtering in New York City?   It is an East Coast option, but the down side is going back to Buffalo to serve things.   Suspect the upstream is an issue based on the fallout from prior site and some of our mutual feelings.

Would be ideal if you could tunnel the DDoS in NYC to a server elsewhere --- without layover in BUF.

@Francisco, possible?

 

[HalfEatenPie]

Fantastic question!  

In all honesty, we're planning on a complete overhaul on the back-end infrastructure-wise.  Currently we're working with the bare minimum (1 VM for web server, 1 VM for SQL, etc.), but if we want to minimize downtime then we're going to have to add additional VMs into the mix.  Possibly even look into having VMs several locations serving up content (thanks to a few very helpful people!).  

The thing is, this isn't going into our pockets, this is allowing us to improve the site much more so that we can minimize downtime for you guys.  Also, I personally wouldn't mind reimbursing Curtis (MannDude) for all of his current investments into the forum.  

This is all MannDude's department but he's thinking about cooking up some paid advertisements here and there to get us some more traffic.  In addition to that he's also thinking about paid content writers (yes, that's a thing!) for tutorials and we all would definitely love (and honestly better ran (no offense!)) contests with better prizes!  

Whatever's left over (which I doubt could be much really) would be kept in reserve for "rainy day funds".  You never know when a problem could happen where you need quick money to get things moving again.  By taking this step we're able to (hopefully) keep vpsBoard's growth sustainable and maintain it properly.  

We've never tried to hide anything from anyone.  We even posted our analytic/traffic publicly on the forums!  I don't understand how we weren't straight forward.  

 

[MannDude]

Backhauling from CN won't improve your latency, it'll make it worse since it has to go to the east coast.


Remember, we are getting filtering on the east coast soon


Francisco

Yeah, that's why I probably wouldn't do it.

I saw that thread, affordable too. Same east coast location as now or...?

You do realize BuyVM is opening up DDoS protect / filtering in New York City?   It is an East Coast option, but the down side is going back to Buffalo to serve things.   Suspect the upstream is an issue based on the fallout from prior site and some of our mutual feelings.

Would be ideal if you could tunnel the DDoS in NYC to a server elsewhere --- without layover in BUF.

@Francisco, possible?

Oh wait, it's actually NYC and not Buffalo? That's something to consider, then.

 

[D. Strout]

Thanks for all the explanations that have been provided. I just want to ensure transparency in the handling of funds. I have no doubt the money will quickly leak out somewhere - somewhere useful - I'd just like to know where.

 

[drmike]

Last check from thread on here, BuyVM is going to have filtering in New York City proper.  

The catch is  nothing there to get your traffic off to some other location (BuyVM is only doing filtering there, no VPS nodes).

So, traffic goes back to Buffalo and from there you can do GRE tunnel or perhaps something else.  Net result will be +10-15ms.  Still should be way faster than US West/Vegas via Portland with CNServers.

 

[Francisco]

Last check from thread on here, BuyVM is going to have filtering in New York City proper.  

The catch is  nothing there to get your traffic off to some other location (BuyVM is only doing filtering there, no VPS nodes).

So, traffic goes back to Buffalo and from there you can do GRE tunnel or perhaps something else.  Net result will be +10-15ms.  Still should be way faster than US West/Vegas via Portland with CNServers.

I find it pointless to even GRE from us though. I can't split allocations away and start sending GRE's in every which direction because everyone else would want the same If I gave VPSB any special treatment then it gets all mucky.

You're wanting to add an extra point of failure with 0 gains.

Francisco

 

[Ruchirablog]

Why move out from LV? VPSB is super fast for me in Sri Lanka. I'm wondering if VPSB is this much fast for Asians why would it be slow for east coast people. 

 

[MannDude]

Why move out from LV? VPSB is super fast for me in Sri Lanka. I'm wondering if VPSB is this much fast for Asians why would it be slow for east coast people. 

Really? Thats good to know. I don't think there would be a lot noticeable increase in performance in moving, in fact a decent CDN should likely help speed things up for people far away.

 

[drmike]

Why move out from LV? VPSB is super fast for me in Sri Lanka. I'm wondering if VPSB is this much fast for Asians why would it be slow for east coast people. 

The US suffers from very bad routes and high latency from coast to coast.   The experiment of many companies operating backbones and subsequent consolidation and still competition hasn't yielded a superior network.  Yes there are exceptions, yes some routes are superior.  

To illustrate,  not uncommon for me in a US East Coast state to see from here to Vegas, 100ms+.  Recent past, 140ms.  Multiple issues for such, but none I can address as end user.   

I see similarly high (although not as high)  times to popular hubs like San Francisco and Los Angeles.  Not all locations and networks, but too many.

That's why I always advise starting placement of service in the center of the US (Chicago, Kansas City, Dallas, etc.) and going from there.  US West Coast is fairly good placement for Asia.     US East Coast is good for about 1/2 of the USA and Europe if you must serve from the US.

 

[Artie]

I heard ReliableSite started doing east coast protection with their dedicated servers.

 

[Francisco]

I heard ReliableSite started doing east coast protection with their dedicated servers.

Pretty hardcore pricing though.

Francisco

 

[drmike]

Reliable aka Choopa!

Seeing tons of Choopa love the past quarter or two.   DDoS protection though?  Haven't seen anyone chatting it up.  Must cost a hefty bundle.  Love their network though.  

 

[Francisco]

Reliable aka Choopa!

Seeing tons of Choopa love the past quarter or two.   DDoS protection though?  Haven't seen anyone chatting it up.  Must cost a hefty bundle.  Love their network though.

The filtering is $100/m for 1Gbit/100k pps and goes up to $1000/m for 10gig burst.

Francisco

 

[MannDude]

Just an update, still working on this.

Demoed a solution today that looked nice, last updated 2011 and requires EOL PHP versions. Meh, no thanks.

I'll demo some more.