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Re: hosting looper's delight site?



At 12:09 PM -0700 7/21/01, Tom Ritchford wrote:
>I need a server for my own purposes and its capacity mainly goes unused.
>It lives in a dedicated facility somewhere in NJ, it's a Cobalt RaQ 3 if
>that means anything to you... it has the usual array of services
>(cgi, many email addresses, even servlets/JSP)
>
>I host over 70 domains right now.  Of course, most of them
>get very few hits indeed.
>
>
>The usual deal is I do it for free as long as you don't get "too many 
>hits".
>(no one has yet hit this number) and a promise of "something" if you
>"make it big" (no one has done this EITHER but I do get into a lot of
>shows for free).
>
>
>I don't know how many hits Looper's Delight gets, but it can't be that
>many...?  Anyway, I got the impression it's costing someone money
>to host it, money that should be spent on gear (or food or whatever...)

Hi Tom-

thanks for the offer, but I think Looper's Delight might be a lot larger
and more popular than you realize. We already outgrew the usual web hosting
deals had to move to a dedicated co-located server a year and a half ago.
This server (450MHz celeron based linux machine) is fully customized by us
and already beefier than a typical RaQ3, and right now I'm considering
upgrading to a 1GHz PIII server because we are outgrowing it. LD shares it
with a couple of other big sites that I partnered up with. Looper's Delight
by itself, per month, is about 400,000 page views, 700,000 file requests
(hits), 100,000 user sessions, 9GB of bandwidth, and around 1GB of disk
space. Plus a fair amount of CPU in handling the search engine, archiving
and indexing the list, ad serving, mailing list, web server, dns, etc. The
mailing list might have to send anywhere from 25,000 to 100,000 mails a
day. It gets much bigger when you add in the rest of my internet activities
and sites that I host, those monthly totals are about 1 million page views,
9 million hits/files, 40GB bandwidth, and about 6GB of disk space. As it
happens, all of these sites are growing like weeds, and a few other big
sites are getting ready to come on line. so it's only gonna get bigger! And
after many miserable web hosting experiences, these days I insist of full
root access, guaranteed uptime, 24 hour tech support and hardware
monitoring, fully redundant backbone connections, not sharing a server with
100 other sites, etc. So I'm guessing, this is way beyond what you are
willing to do for free...

All this is not cheap, but there is no danger of it going offline. Income
from the sites pays about half of it, and the rest is affordable for me.
However, I would prefer to see LD be self-sufficient. In other words, it
should not be freeloading off of me or you or anybody else to exist, it
should pay it's own way. For this, I hope the people who use the site and
enjoy the list can help out. That can be through buying Looper's Delight
cd's, or using the affiliate links I have on the LD site when you can to
buy gear (zzounds, sonic foundry, amazon), or making a donation through the
donation links I've got set up on the site, or buying a t-shirt when we get
around to that. And any of you who have something to advertise, LD is a
fine place to do it and I'm happy to make some reasonable deal to make it
work. Could be a product you sell, or your own cd, or something else. The
whole looping world is watching if you put it on LD!

enough groveling for now. :-)

kim

______________________________________________________________________
Kim Flint                     | Looper's Delight
kflint@loopers-delight.com    | http://www.loopers-delight.com