vpsBoard advertisements.

[Marc M.]

Just to jump in here.. I'm not interested in being compensated in any way. I'm doing this because I want to so if there was ever a slice that was 'due' to me I'd want that put back in the pot or donated to charity.

@MartinD I wasn't thinking about you - I was thinking about Curtis. He dedicates a very large chunk of his time to this forum, and supports it out of his pocket.

Keeping the forum provider neutral while monetizing it at the same time for future growth could make vpsBoard the best hosting forum there is. No "Proudly Hosted by ACME VPS Inc." type of B.S. Heck, even WHT has a "Hosted by LiquidWeb" ad right at the top. Now that forum is plastered with ads to the point of making someone puke, not to mention the dead - zombie like - color scheme. Maybe it's trying to convey a message? I don't know. What I do know is that ads would most likely be kept to a minimum and they would be done in good taste here.

I'd say that fixed donation amounts and in house ads are the way to go. For example no member or provider could donate more than say $5/mo. Or you can make it $5 for members, $10 for providers (just spit-balling numbers here). As long as the ads are done in good taste and reviewed by the staff before being approved there shouldn't be any problem.

Anyway, this is my view on things, everyone is entitled to their own.

 

[Kenshin]

I agree with Marc, how many non-providers are willing to shell out the cash to keep the forums running assuming the costs go up due to having more users? Almost every other large forum/site has targeted ads, the ads at least keep the website hosted, profit aside. Without the site up, there won't be users. Vicious cycle yes, but end of the day it's the business owners in the forum/site that would be more than willing to shell out the cash, while some business owners would want something back in kind (ads), others at least want the site to be up so that their forum offers gain exposure.

TLDR; I believe it's in everyone's interest (business owners or users) for the site to remain up, but the fact is that mainly the providers would be happy to shell the cash.

Redundant/distributed on a geographical level may not be suitable for a forum that has high writes due to MySQL updates. The latency would probably kill performance and cause more problems that it's worth. Once the site grows beyond the current infrastructure (VPSes) we're looking at a significant bump in costs since we all know we can get a decent VPS at $7/m, but can you really get a decent dedicated at that price?

TLDR; Site needs $$ to grow

Not accepting service donations from providers for the actual site hosting is actually a good thing in my opinion, but it also means that cold hard cash is king to allow MannDude to select whichever provider he wants to work with. BuyVM's DDOS protection is pretty necessary at this point, but it could also easily be tunneled to a dedicated server for the raw performance improvement. The cash from ads could fund all these.

TLDR; Cash from ads is king, allows MannDude to pay any provider necessary

However, one way I can think of that service donations (from providers or users) can help would be a varnish cache for the static elements. That would help offload some bandwidth and processing power and possibly create a community effort. Rage4 DNS + uptimerobot should do pretty good magic for this. PHP/MySQL load can continue to be served from a VPS/Dedi behind BuyVM's DDOS protected IP.

TLDR; Community CDN for static elements FTW?

*PS* Sorry if the points are all over the place and some of them conflicting, can't figure out how to string my post together so I ended up just TLDR-ing every paragraph.

 

[drmike]

The site has been running good lately.  But, there is a growth/use limit no doubt.  

With injecting self ran ad program, there is a cost (another VPS in same datacenter most likely).

Fair to foresee the need to bump up to a dedicated server.

There is the geography issue as US West Coast isn't best for latency for Europe.

CDN certainly becomes necessary as we all clutter things with more graphics  

Rage4 DNS + uptimerobot should do pretty good magic for this.

Rage4 indeed is the route to go I think.  Plus they are members on here (I think).  That's a $20+/- USD new charge a month on the unlimited provider plan.  UptimeRobot = not real reliable and 5 minute checks which is way too high.   So probably needing another API enabled monitoring service that is likely paid also = more cashola each month.

Realistic budgeting should be $200+ a month a few months out just for server + VPS + DDoS + CDN + monitoring + ???

 

[drmike]

Whew and we are back...

Yeah, we need to get redundancy built into VPSBoard ASAP.

 

[drmike]

redundancy

Redundancy should include a totally separate US East Coast instance with DDoS protection.

Will help for delays those in Europe might still be experiencing and *if* Vegas goes down again, the site can keep rolling on.

Thanks to the BuyVM crew, again.  Had to be hectic with nodes down and damage. 

 

[Marc M.]

Yeah, we need to get redundancy built into VPSBoard ASAP.

@ I'm sure that a few donations will cover that in no time... wait, what if next month there won't be any or not enough?

 

[Tux]

I personally use Project Wonderful. It's very flexible so it takes away the need to do ads in-house, although I'm sure you'll stay in-house.

Anyway, I say go for it if it's not obnoxiously in your face. A nice small text ad on the sidebar or at the top would be fine.

 

[HalfEatenPie]

And... this is why we require better funding.  I'd prefer advertisements or fundraising to be started earlier rather than later so that we can begin redundancy in addition to the DDoS protection vpsBoard needs.  

Situation: 

FiberHub Datacenter had a loss of power today.  The USPs the server was on kicked in but due to the backup generators not starting up on-time the batteries ran out.  The backup generators had to be started by hand and when they did kick in several servers did not automatically boot up.  Because of this all servers had to be manually started and from there BuyVM had to manually start each KVM container.

This is my understanding of the situation.  If there's a more up-to-date clarification that'd be much appreciated.  

 

[drmike]

Pie hit the situation head on.

There is an incident report that Fiberhub will produce at some point probably tomorrow indicating the failure, scope and what corrective actions they intend on taking.  When it shows up in public, one of us will get it over here.

Fiberhub has prior electric issues like this.  This makes the fourth time I believe.

 

[Marc M.]

Fiberhub has prior electric issues like this. This makes the fourth time I believe.

@ seems like someone's cutting corners somewhere. I wonder how much their own report can be trusted.

 

[acd]

Because of this all servers had to be manually started and from there BuyVM had to manually start each KVM container.

My understanding is the HNs didn't power back on automatically on a few KVM nodes, and needed intervention by Fiberhub, who as you can imagine were pretty busy. Once they booted, it just took a while for fsck and however many VMs to start up automatically. I dunno how much fran, bz and aldryic had to do manual-like.

 

[Marc M.]

I don't think that we should derail the thread with Fiberhub's electrical issues. I'm glad that Francisco and Aldryic were on top of it and everything is back to normal.

That being said, if there was anything that today's incident has shown us then it is that this forum needs proper funding so that it can run on a dedicated server with proper redundancies in place. We all love vpsBoard, so lets help it improve and grow!

 

[mikho]

And... this is why we require better funding. I'd prefer advertisements or fundraising to be started earlier rather than later so that we can begin redundancy in addition to the DDoS protection vpsBoard needs.


Situation:


FiberHub Datacenter had a loss of power today. The USPs the server was on kicked in but due to the backup generators not starting up on-time the batteries ran out. The backup generators had to be started by hand and when they did kick in several servers did not automatically boot up. Because of this all servers had to be manually started and from there BuyVM had to manually start each KVM container.


This is my understanding of the situation. If there's a more up-to-date clarification that'd be much appreciated.

And as you already read multiple times, people are more then willing to cough up the money.


So if this is something that needs to be done right now, setup an account where money can be sent and start working.


Fix the ad parts later on when the redundancy is finished.


If you can get a quote on the things you need for 6 months (should be enough to get the ads part rolling) and I'll probably can arrange that funding. Not being associated with any provider (except being moderator on lowendspirit) there would be no discussion on having providers pitching in and the board "getting hosted for free" discussions.


Rambling but it's hot here and I need to take swim now .

 

[drmike]

I wonder how much their own report can be trusted.

Well Fran was already in line with cash and gear ready to be ordered for second leg of power - to prevent single feed failure.  Just heard recently (prior to this) that he was leaving Rob T. alone for a bit about the electricity stuff.  This shuffled the deck priority for sure.

Rob is an honest guy.  I am wondering if he still is using the same electrician/company though.   That was one of the prior issues Electrician did something boo boo.

Possible Fiberhub had multiple feeds brownout and auto transfer stuff safety stopped from spinning up gen set and transitioning over.  Would be rare, but temperatures are 100+ and 90's at night now in Vegas.  Grid out there has been getting banged up for days (well California mainly). 

There was a large breaker in the facility that was replaced last time that someone was unsure about if damaged.  

Will be interesting since cascading failures on several things.

 

[Marc M.]

Rambling but it's hot here and I need to take swim now .

Vacation must be awesome! I envy you @mikho

 

[Marc M.]

@ as you'd imagine I don't know anything about Fiberhub so I said what anyone would say that's just observing things. Anyway, Vegas can't ever get enough electricity to feed it's hunger for power. So it's not that big of a surprise that it happened there. From what I know about Vegas (and I haven't been there but maybe three times), they have to negotiate for electricity on a daily basis due to high consumption.

 

[peterw]

What about taxes? I think there is a difference between donations and income out of ads. Would that not make the tax return complicated?

 

[drmike]

they have to negotiate for electricity on a daily basis due to high consumption.

 

Welll the way the local utility talks, 70% of that utility's power which covers Vegas and areas up north around Battle Mountain generates 70% of their power from their own natural gas gen plants.  30% gap comes from Hoover Dam.

The California grid operator thing I looked at seemed to have enough headroom and proper forecasting for peaks all day.

I couldn't find any official outage, but I am not familiar with the utilities and reporting mechanisms out there.

Vegas does have a power addiction issue.  But having California slurp out Hoover's generation is part of the issue along with local utility not having any generation at Hoover (they have to buy/trade for it).

Electric outages due to pricing games are just that. Enron anyone?

 

[drmike]

What about taxes? I think there is a difference between donations and income out of ads. Would that not make the tax return complicated?

Income is income, even if donations are source of it.  The tax nazis don't care if the income is from selling dope, humans or from robbing school children.

Donations are only handled differently where IRS has issued non profit 501©(x) status.  That's multiple years of begging, pleading and conning.  Thousands of dollars also to get there.

 

[mikho]

Vacation must be awesome! I envy you @mikho

Its been good to me, gone from 12-14 cups of coffee /day to 1-2 in the morning.