"Inflated costs hit Freewargamesrules" Topic

I'm in a bit of a predicament this month, my domain host where i have had the site for the last 3 to 4 years has hit me with a bill this month for 4 times the monthly cost due to what it calls ""Excessive Site Traffic".

I have always had 15GB monthly traffic which I have never come close to exceeding.

In the last 4 weeks I have averaged 1200 hits per day and exceeding the 15GB limit with 9 days to go.

I've calculated it now costs me a whopping £552.00 GBP a year to run my site – that's not sustainable…..so I'm desperately looking at ways of (a) reducing costs (b) generating some revenue.

Pete Jones
freewargamesrules.co.uk

Advertising springs readily into mind.

Sounds like an expensive host. I do not know how much space you need, but you can get 100gig Disk Space with 1000gig Monthly Data Transfer for $7.00 USD a month at some places.

Greg

Maybe a naive thought, but I'd think that locking the site after 15GB for the rest of the month would be an option. First come, first serve.

Advertising would be an option.

Making the site a paysite with a modest fee could be an option, and that would also severely reduce traffic. The site would lose much of it's idea, as it wouldn't be 'free'wargamesrules anymore.

A combination of advertising and maybe selling links on top of the lists for anyone who wants their rules to appear on top. This could also be allowed for commercial rules, so for WW2 rules you might have FoW and BKC first, and after that a listing of the free rules.

Wow!

Try Bluehost.com My sites run me about $7 USD a month and the service and reliability are great!

Advertising is one way; bandwidth caps would be another but would leave your site inaccessible for some period of time (daily cap / monthly cap / whatever).

I notice that with your new TiddlyWiki site, whenever someone visits they essentially download the entire site. That's a lot of data. If you abandoned that concept and let viewers just hit one page at a time, you should see a drop in traffic (I seriously doubt that every viewer is going to visit every single page on the site with every visit!).

Can you compare pre- and post- TiddlyWiki traffic patterns / volume?

Cheers,
Sumo

It looks like your main page is quite large (~.5 megs). If you could pare that down to ~50k or less, you would not only save piles on bandwidth, but also make it easier for those on slower connections and those short on system memory.

Having the various shiny effects when selecting links is neat and all, but it is rather slow. Instead of having all the code on one page, split it into separate pages for each section, using CSS and server-side includes to keep the look the same across the different pages. Then when someone is looking for only ACW rules, they only have to download the main page and ACW page.

Just a thought.

There are a LOT of hosts out there for a better price. Bandwidth these days is pretty cheap.

I have to agree. Since the chnage to the Wiki style the site has been much slower – probably because of all the data being shifted. Try going back to the old methos and see if things improve.

Another option I'm looking at is hosting this on a free wiki site at:

link

Then all I would have to do is bounce on the freewargamesrules domain name to it.

Pete

An option also suggested to me was to even easier. Put an automatic redirection page at the main page which re-directs on to the tiddlyspot site (this hasn't been implemented yet but its a beta version.

e.g.
link

Please try it and tell me what you think.

Pete (Webmaster)

P.S. The cheapest I can get it with my current host on Business Rate at the current traffic rate is £132.00 GBP per year. The redirection method would keep costs down to the current £71.00 GBP per year.

Yahoo Groups are free.

Not sure how much info you can put in the files section, but I think it is quite a bit.

If necessary, you could break them up by period, e.g. medieval rules, napoleonic period, WW II, etc., and then provide links to all of them, in the Links section.

The sites can be set up so that you don't need to be a member to join them, or you can set it up so that you do.

The sites would also permit discussion about the various rules sets as well.

Pete, redirect to tiddlyspot was pretty seemless.

Cheers & keep up the good work
Sumo

I use your site frequently. If you need me to kick in something to help this month, just let me know where and I'll send a check. I truly appreciate what you have done.

By the way, you can email me at PaulCollins@dc.rr.com

If you've had a spike like that you may be getting spiders and bots hitting your pages. And if your front page is 5meg (!!) then you're going to aggravate the problem.

Can your provider get you info on who is visiting?

Seems there's also a Big Difference between UK hosts and their parent sister companies too.

1and1.com $2.25/month with 250GB transfer traffic and then $0.10/GB over that.

1and1.co.uk $11/month with 15GB transfer traffic and then $9.00/GB over that

Unfortunatly because it is a .co.uk address I have to register with the UK one!

Having a .co.uk domain shouldn't stop you hosting in the US.

Not sure if this is the case for you but its generally a bad idea to use the same company to host and to act as your registrar as it tends to tie you in too much.

You could always get a .com domain anyway. Its not like the site is specifically targeted at the UK. Also paying £71.00 GBP a year to just redirect to another site seems very expensive.

I may well close that domain down eventually.

It is hosting about 50mb of other files for me though at the moment

I'd recommend getting rid of the javascript and going back to the older, plainer, system. It worked just as well and I'm sure used much lest bandwidth.