outage

[samcurry]

Sorry for the inconvience this morning. we had used up our bandwidth for the month.
We are currently using about a gig a day. Our contract right now allows for 30 gig a month. I had it increased for the day.
Tomorrow starts another month so we get to start all over again. We are currently working with the host to get onto a semi dedicated server, which will give us more room for growth.
You guys are so great, i never expected to see the growth we have had in less than a year.
Unfortunately with the growth comes more expenses. the new server will double our current cost. Soo..... if you feel generous
and would like to help us out, we do have a donate button. its set for 5.00 dollars. You can donate as little as that or as much over as you would like.
We are incorporating a few perks for the donations, once we get them worked out i or fury will post them up.
Thanks again guys and girls, you are what makes the board what it is.
Sam

 

[PT]

I'll hit that donate button tomorrow, sorry I haven't yet. You guys are great.

 

[fury]

Thanks PT

 

[samcurry]

thanks PT appreciate it

 

[PT]

No, really. Thank you. I'm quite sure this place is costing you more that we donate, yet you still do it. I don't have that kind of philanthropic spirit, yet I still respect the hell out of it. I know fury doesn't get much around here except grief from all of us when things don't work right or don't work the way we want them to, yet he continues on. I just hope that the word about OTC doesn't get out too much, I personally think it's perfect right now, large enough to stay busy, small enough that we all pretty well know each other.






edit: Still no damn spell checker, dammit.

 

[freako104]

when i get a paypal credit card ill start donating. im sorry i dont have a CC to donate now

 

[Shadowfax]

coming up...hope it'll help you at least a bit

 

[AlladinSane]

What's the possibility of puting some ads on the board? (no pop-up, static ones) I've been comparing our traffic with HWC and we have almost always at least half of users browsing. Sure they got more guests, but sometimes we're even. Their peak of user was 105 6 months ago. Ours was 42 in the beggining of the year. That's pretty good for a site of the age of OTC. If it was possible to get some sponsors that didn't conflict with HWC, maybe that helped...

 

[freako104]

send me an email or a pm and ill do what i can to help thanks shadow for the info ill keep my eyes and ears open

 

[PT]

I was wondering about ads too, would be cool, but since we aren't a hardware forum, or any one genre of forum, it might be hard. Have to go with the Xcam or something, I'm afraid.

 

[samcurry]

thanks, shadowfax as always much appreciated.

noite, we are looking at some type of ads. But we dont want anything obtrusive. thinking something small at the bottom of the page. like a buy.com or amazon.com ad.
but the most seem to be if you purchase something. the click ads tend to be gaudy and most dont care for them.
orginally we wanted to keep the site ad free, but at its growth im not sure how long we can do it.

 

[HomeLAN]

Costs are going up, eh? Well, I've got a paying project this weekend. I'll see if I can throw some kibble your way.

 

[fury]

The ad industry is overflowing with spyware, so much that even formerly respectable advertising companies have "sold out", so to speak, and are resorting to gathering the activities of users and selling them to spamming companies.

I would be a bit hesitant even putting a non-spyware ad up, because if we did that, we'd likely have to adhere to XYZ company's policies which usually do not allow trivial things that we allow here like fucking cursing and the occasional babe pic. (those companies that pay per each view of the ad, anyway, which is the most effective way to get paid for ads since very few people actually click on something and go buy stuff)

The huge difference between HWC and us is that HWC is a corporately owned content-based site that has a reputation for big-name hardware reviews, with shitloads of unique viewers, and that makes them a high priced target for the ad industry. They have one large source of income: Those big-ass ads that probably pay a billion dollars per view.

We are a privately owned community-based group that's just outgrowing the inexpensive kind of hosting plans. Our sources of income: Sam's pocket, and the donation account. Since the latter is only filled by voluntary contributions, the former often gets bit into pretty hard.

The last couple months have been good, we've managed to stay afloat with just using the donation account to pay up, but only due to how cheap our current hosting plan is (in comparison to what it will be soon). When we move up into the semi-dedicated arena, it's gonna start emptying out a lot quicker.

 

[unclehobart]

How much did that one gig float cost us?

 

[samcurry]

2-4 bucks, not sure off hand. didnt really matter to me just wanted it back up.

 

[unclehobart]

Do we all need to avoid uploading piccys and whatnot for the day to avoid taxing it out again?

 

[fury]

$2, and nah, just continue on with normal usage. We do about a gig a day anyway.

 

[unclehobart]

Would it help if we dialed back the AV sizes again?

 

[PT]

I disabled avatars and showing pics automatically for today. It's in the control panel under options.

 

[Nixy]

Sammy baby, I don't have a CC or anything and won't have one for ALONG time but if you PM me your addy I will get some $$ off to you as soon as I can. Won't be much but I hope it will help.