Virtulization - Page 2 - Calgarypuck Forums - The Unofficial Calgary Flames Fan Community

GGG · 02-02-2010, 08:23 PM

A reward for those who pay could just be priority access to the server during busy periods where the server begins to timeout. I`m not sure how difficult that would be to implement but it would be a tangible benefit that directly relates to what the money donated helped to prevent.

I would gladly pay a nominal fee per year that provide no real tangible benefits

teamchachi · 02-02-2010, 08:36 PM

I run all my company stuff on Amazon EC2. I love it. But the issue with going into the cloud is the higher monthly cost. It is much cheaper to setup, but the monthly cost is 2-3x the cost of buying hardware and put it into a budget colo.

To run it on EC2 we'd need to raise about $1500 to pay for a couple of high-CPU medium Linux instances, and then we'd be looking at ongoing costs in the $200 range for hourly costs, bandwidth, load balancing, additional instances during peak periods, elastic IPs, etc.

The benefit of running the site in the cloud is the ability to add extra server instances during peak periods, and then the ability to shut them off when they aren't required. We can even program the site to auto-scale the number of instances on an hourly basis depending on load.

Pretty cool. So you would NEVER get a busy message. Anything can be done with time and money...

HOOT · 02-02-2010, 09:22 PM

I feel bad for Photon he just had to explain all this to me by PM a day ago. lol

Bingo if you are listening and want some help to get a donation drive/'community support' memberships together I am more than willing to help any way I can.

From the numbers I have seen this is more than doable and speaking with other CPers in hockey pool or in the CP chat most seem willing to donate. Even if some people can't donate a lot, even $5-20, it would go a long way.

I was going to PM Bingo but instead I will make a public plea.....PLEASE!!!

Berger_4_ · 02-03-2010, 01:49 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by teamchachi

To run it on EC2 we'd need to raise about $1500 to pay for a couple of high-CPU medium Linux instances, and then we'd be looking at ongoing costs in the $200 range for hourly costs, bandwidth, load balancing, additional instances during peak periods, elastic IPs, etc.

So an extra 200 a month, plus the $1500 up front? Would it be possible to even put (dare I say it) more ads on here? I'm a complete noob with this sort of thing so I'm just curious. I know at Ultimate Guitar (on the actual tabs portion, not the forum...but it's still under the same site) they've got those interactive ad things that play...they're kinda aggravating but could a person just run those for a little while then once the server is paid off get rid of them?

Maybe we don't even need to do that...would people just look into the goodness of their hearts, and the fact that they are getting a great service here and donate? Those who do don't even need something special as far as I'm concerned. Sure it'd be neat to have, but if you're afraid of people getting uppity about it, is it really necessary? I'd be content in knowing I helped grow the place, however minimal my impact might be.

Azure · 02-03-2010, 03:09 PM

We have around 4,000 active members, and up to 10,000 guests, right?

Between the two we should easily be able to raise enough money to move to a cloud.

Is the $200/month? Or what? $2,400/year to run CP. I wonder how much money Bingo gets from ads.

Cause $2,400/year is a steep cost.

There are a few options though. We could do a donation drive each year to raise funds that will help pay for the yearly cost, or we could do a raffle or something like that. Say someone donates a couple sets of tickets to a Flames game, and we raffle them off. I think we've done something like this before too.

Another thing is to put a image on the side that displays the monthly cost along with a donate button and how much money we still need. I think if people know they might put down a couple dollars to help out. Cause all it would take would be a couple dollars.

I like the idea of extra goodies for a paying member, but we also want to drive traffic to the server. More traffic equals more money from ads.

I also wonder if any of the big companies in Calgary such as Telus, Rogers, Shaw, etc, etc would pay more for targeted advertising. I know Techcruch has advertisement slots available to buy and they sell them for thousands of dollars. Sure we don't get the traffic they get, but we still do pretty good.

Azure · 02-03-2010, 03:10 PM

Also, who wants to contact Bingo and ask him about it?

I could if nobody else will.

photon · 02-03-2010, 04:06 PM

I think all of those things have come up in talks at one point or another Azure, good ideas all.

Let's keep the discussion abstract at this point, at least for a while longer, I'm currently working on a few other things.

HOOT · 02-03-2010, 05:17 PM

The only ads I seem to get are these Evony ads and TBQH I would never click on something like that.

Yeah_Baby · 02-03-2010, 05:27 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by HOOT

The only ads I seem to get are these Evony ads and TBQH I would never click on something like that.

Clearly not a fan of the cleavage bait and switch eh?

teamchachi · 02-03-2010, 08:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Azure

We have around 4,000 active members, and up to 10,000 guests, right?

Between the two we should easily be able to raise enough money to move to a cloud.

Is the $200/month? Or what? $2,400/year to run CP. I wonder how much money Bingo gets from ads.

Cause $2,400/year is a steep cost.

There are a few options though. We could do a donation drive each year to raise funds that will help pay for the yearly cost, or we could do a raffle or something like that. Say someone donates a couple sets of tickets to a Flames game, and we raffle them off. I think we've done something like this before too.

Another thing is to put a image on the side that displays the monthly cost along with a donate button and how much money we still need. I think if people know they might put down a couple dollars to help out. Cause all it would take would be a couple dollars.

I like the idea of extra goodies for a paying member, but we also want to drive traffic to the server. More traffic equals more money from ads.

I also wonder if any of the big companies in Calgary such as Telus, Rogers, Shaw, etc, etc would pay more for targeted advertising. I know Techcruch has advertisement slots available to buy and they sell them for thousands of dollars. Sure we don't get the traffic they get, but we still do pretty good.

Actually.... $2400 for a large Vbulletin forum site would be really cheap if you were talking about physical hardware in colo. You're looking at $6000-8000 in hardware for the servers. The a typical cost for a 1u server in a rack is in the $150/month range with a minimal amount of bandwidth. We would need at least 2x 1u servers = $300/month. Now you have to pay for your bandwidth which would normally be in the $100+/month range (at least). So actually, physical colo in Calgary would be more like $4800/year. Or more.

Luckily we only have a single server and we've got a great deal at a datacentre in Kelowna. But even then it certainly isn't free.

Unfortunately, Vbulletin is a *HOG*. It requires a lot of horsepower to handle heavy loads. And we frequently see 15-20 page requests per second. That requires 30-40 nasty mysql queries per request, a bunch of PHP processing, and some serious disk I/O. That is as much as 800 mysql queries per second!

We knew this time would come, and we're looking at alternatives. But I agree with Photon. Let's wait a bit before organizing a fundraising committee.

Azure · 02-03-2010, 09:40 PM

Good info all around.

I think I can speak for the rest of the board....when the times comes for a move, a switch or a new server....please don't be afraid to start a fundraising drive.

We can ALL chip in...and I suspect that we will be able to put together more funds than anyone might expect.

teamchachi · 02-03-2010, 10:19 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by photon

I think all of those things have come up in talks at one point or another Azure, good ideas all.

Let's keep the discussion abstract at this point, at least for a while longer, I'm currently working on a few other things.

What he said. An interesting possibility has come up that would almost certainly provide us with enough horsepower for the next several years. If that falls through, then we can look at a fundraising drive. We should have something in place pre-playoffs either way.

Pastiche · 02-04-2010, 08:45 AM

What are alternatives to vbulletin? Is a migration of the database to a new forum software exhorbitant?

GreenTeaFrapp · 02-04-2010, 08:58 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Pastiche

What are alternatives to vbulletin? Is a migration of the database to a new forum software exhorbitant?

vbulletin is the standard for forum software.

Barnes · 02-04-2010, 09:42 AM

Here is something you may want to keep an eye on.

http://developers.facebook.com/news....og=1&story=358

photon · 02-04-2010, 10:13 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Pastiche

What are alternatives to vbulletin? Is a migration of the database to a new forum software exhorbitant?

vB is one of the best ones, there are a few others (Invision) but the cost of the software is about the same as is the performance.

The reason these things are resource hogs is every page is completely dynamic, generated uniquely for you each time you view it. Every single time someone posts something, views something, does anything the information in the database changes so the next page view has to be generated from scratch to reflect that.

So you have 1300 people all requesting a new page view every 30 seconds. And regardless of how good the software is, you still have to make tons of queries to the database for every page.

I get the sense from talking to people that run really huge boards that there's really no easy solution to scaling problems.. every huge board has either taken commercial or open source software and rewrote a bunch of it to improve the efficiency or have written their own custom forum software.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Barnes

Here is something you may want to keep an eye on.

http://developers.facebook.com/news....og=1&story=358

Yeah I've been reading about that, might be interesting to see how that works out.

Pastiche · 02-04-2010, 10:29 AM

What are some examples of huge internet forums? Something Awful comes to mind.

photon · 02-04-2010, 10:42 AM

Yeah, SA.. Offtopic.com. IGN. Some of the car forums are pretty big.

http://www.big-boards.com/

List of the biggest ones.

Azure · 02-04-2010, 11:20 AM

Do you have any idea how many new members we're getting every month?

I see that in the game threads and PGTs as well a lot of new people are posting.

If the Flames do well in the playoffs we'll get a lot more as well. Plus, even just with basic hockey discussion....we get a lot of compliments. Nevermind the off-topic forum which is also impressive to just read through let alone get involved with.

Azure · 02-04-2010, 11:25 AM

Interesting....I just noticed that we're almost at 2.3 million posts. I don't quite remember when exactly we hit 2 million posts but it wasn't that long ago.

6 months ago? 300,000 posts every 6 months means around 1,600 per day. Sound about right?

That comes out to around 1 post per min.

I would think it is a lot higher. WAY higher actually.