Spithead...we have a problem

I've done a little digging, and currently the BG site seems to be hosted with "Joe's Datacentre" in Kansas.

They have a website too: joesdatacenter.com , the front page of which proudly proclaims "dedicated servers for $35 a month". How is this possible, one asks? I suspect that the answer is contained within their "Datacentre Virtual Tour":

joesdatacenter.com/wp-content/gallery/dedicated-server-tour/rowa.jpg






* Excuse my mangling the links a little - the Spare Goggles software takes exception to my posting them fully on a brand new account

The problem is that I suspect BG is not the richest organisation in the world and yeah .... joe's may be cheap (and certainly not the "slickest" operation I've seen  ) but as long as it gets the job done......

The problem is equally likely to be software related as hardware so Proteus and the gang have my sympathy (and support should they want it )

Likewise, and nothing I've said above was intended as a criticism of the BG crew in any way

If between us (and I mean the entire BG comunity) we were able to fix up something suitable at a lower price (aiming at free), would the offer be taken up?

Dunno to honest.
Good idea in principle.

Drop a PM to the devourer of ugly baked goods (Proteus) once BG is back up.

You woud need a significant (and dedicated) internet connection, BG has a LOT of traffic per day - it will swallow a home broadband connection. Connection wise we are talking about a business type package / leased line. Probably talking a minimum of 20Mb + upload speed, though I would say more.


Hardware wise BG is not too greedy, assuming a dedicated server. Any decent modest server with a few Tb of storage would see us right for some time.

However non of that is cheap. If people were willing to pay the approx £500 - £1000 per month for a leased line, I would happily donate a Xeon server and run the hardware myself (Proteus still doing his thing, natch). But that is never going to happen...

SS

Siliconous Skumins wrote:Probably talking a minimum of 20Mb + upload speed, though I would say more.

Hmm, that's quite high. Have you got access to the MRTG graphs from Joe's to check?

For comparison, our #1 shared webserver has about 250 domains hosted on it (including a couple of forums sites) and trundles along at an average of 2Mbit out/1Mbit in over the last 24 hours. I see a spike to 7Mbit out, and historic spikes up to about 20Mbit.

If BG is doing 10x that on it's own... blimey. Is the zlib compression turned off?

That'll teach ya ta criticize the big Kahuna.

(geez, my slang is so outdated...)

Siliconous Skumins wrote:You woud need a significant (and dedicated) internet connection, BG has a LOT of traffic per day - it will swallow a home broadband connection. Connection wise we are talking about a business type package / leased line. Probably talking a minimum of 20Mb + upload speed, though I would say more.


Hardware wise BG is not too greedy, assuming a dedicated server. Any decent modest server with a few Tb of storage would see us right for some time.

However non of that is cheap. If people were willing to pay the approx £500 - £1000 per month for a leased line, I would happily donate a Xeon server and run the hardware myself (Proteus still doing his thing, natch). But that is never going to happen...

SS

Can someone more knowledgeable on the subject explain to me why hosting would need to be so expensive?

If all it takes is a 20 Mbit upload capacity, this is easily covered by a glassfiber internet connection. A 50mbit up/down connection costs 45 euros a month. a 100/100 is about 60 euros / month. I haven't been paying much attention to PC prices the last few years, but I did a quick price check and a PC with 8 gigs of ram and a 1 TB HD can be had for under 600. Let's say it needs to be replaced completely every 3 years and it'll cost you 200 a year, less than 20 a month.

So unless I am missing somethign significant here, the whole thing could be accomplished for 65~80 a month..

And we are back. Perhaps we should continue this in the engine room?

Miss Gaslight wrote:And we are back.  Perhaps we should continue this in the engine room?

And we're off again  

This is it. I have known we would have to change for a while and this proves it. What bg needs are a few more dedicated people to help the mod team and to keep the lights on. With all these outages we are loosing people and if we don't put in the effort we are going to fade away.

I don't have permission to do this but I am going to any way. Are any of you interested in helping run the forum? How about helping us spread the word that we exist to being in new members or keeping up with the blog? We need people now more than ever and you all seem pretty keen so anyone want to step up?

I'd be more than happy to help out in any way possible!
I'm on the forum a couple hours each day anyways, might as well do something useful then, eh?

And we're back again! (I hope?)

I am making a thread in the engine room so please follow me there.

08.06.2013 Ooops... A hiccup at 1:30PM CST apparently has the BG server unresponsive again

Yeah.... 

Started getting slow, then it stopped responding about 15mins ago.

And here we are again...

SS

SS - anyway to narrow down the issues ??

are we being spam botted again ??
DoS attack ?
Volume of traffic ?
Db errors ??

Lots of ways.... sadly only Proteus has access to that info.

However, here is a screen grab of a live stream from the location of our server:



And the live video is just as active - think they went home...  

SS

Siliconous Skumins wrote:Lots of ways.... sadly only Proteus has access to that info.

However, here is a screen grab of a live stream from the location of our server:



And the live video is just as active - think they went home...  

SS

Good old Joe's datacentre
lol

<deleted>

Yeah he's in the USA, as are half the admin staff. We had issues regarding price Vs performance regarding hosting, so this was the cheapest. We've been with a few hosts over the years, and exceeded several data plans too.


Aaaaand we're back!