Underwater Photography magazine website

Hi all

Just in case anyone is wondering, or has asked you, why the Underwater Photography magazine website is down, it's because my service provider pulled the plug on me as we were generating too much bandwidth. They want me to move to a dedicated server which will cost a lot, lot more. There's a full explanation at www.uwpmag.co.uk

I'm looking into an economic solution and will keep you posted of any progress.

Regards

Peter Rowlands

Peter,

How much bandwidth is too much? Knowing how much you use would make it easier to suggest a solution.

Alex

Hi Alex

I'm not 100% au fait with stats numbering but it looks like 80-100gig in the month a new issue comes out and about 30-40gig the following month.

Best wishes

Peter Rowlands

Hi Peter,

Powweb hosting company allows for 100gig per day (3000gig per month) of transfer and costs about US$ 100 per year ($140 for the first two years). I used them for 2 years and had absolutely no problems.

Luiz

Hi Alex

I'm not 100% au fait with stats numbering but it looks like 80-100gig in the month a new issue comes out and about 30-40gig the following month.

Best wishes

Peter Rowlands

Hey Peter,

Not sure what other requirements you have in terms of a web site but these guys offer300 gig of disk space and 3000 gigs a month of data transfer for a very very reasonable price:

http://www.powweb.com/powweb/hosting.bml

note: i don't work for them nor am i associated with them apart from being a customer of theirs that's all.

fwiw :)/paul

edit : oops beaten by luiz

Hi Luiz and Paul

Thanks for the link. It looks very promising. I'll follow it up and will keep you posted

Best regards

Peter Rowlands

Hi Peter

Check out servage.net. My partner and I have used this host for a couple of years now and we would recommend them to anyone. We have multiple sites running with them and haven't had any problems while using them.

You get 310gb space and 3000gb per month bandwidth plus other stuff and it is cheap.

Use this link when you sign up and you will get extras, so do we.

http://www.servage.net/?coupon=cust11420

Thanks scubamargie

I've e mailed them and will let you know how I get on

Regards

Peter Rowlands

Peter -- be sure to read the fine print. Many of those cheap web hosts reserve the right to cancel you at any time. Users that start using a lot of CPU or bandwidth are at risk!

Peter -- be sure to read the fine print. Many of those cheap web hosts reserve the right to cancel you at any time. Users that start using a lot of CPU or bandwidth are at risk!

Hi Eric

That's exactly what my host did to me (and refund either). They won't even let me put up a home page to explain what's happening. Needless to say I'm looking for a new host for UwP and you're absolutely right about the small print! The sales dept say "There's no limit" The fine print is not quite as generous!

I'll keep you posted

Regards

Peter Rowlands

A hosting company that just shuts you off without any advance warning and no way to continue your site/business in even a toned down version has no place in this day and age. Im also really amazed that they would do this for a mere 100GB/month. Thats nothing, a trifle, at least for any serious hosting company.

The problem is usually not the traffic. If we ever have issues with a customer (very rare) it's because their site is resource-hungry in other ways. Memory, CPU, disk, whatever. For products where a customer has to share their site with dozens or even hundreds of others, you cant have 1 site hogging a server. In most cases this could easily be solved with better programming of the site.

If it's really a question of traffic, maybe you can split the hosting of the PDFs away from the regular site.

Hope you get this solved,

Cor

Hi all

Just in case anyone is wondering, or has asked you, why the Underwater Photography magazine website is down, it's because my service provider pulled the plug on me as we were generating too much bandwidth. They want me to move to a dedicated server which will cost a lot, lot more. There's a full explanation at www.uwpmag.co.uk

I'm looking into an economic solution and will keep you posted of any progress.

Regards

Peter Rowlands

Thanks for the info, I was about to ask.

Could this bandwith issue be related to the problems I had downloading the last issues on my slow connection (44 kbits/s) :_( ?

It may took me one hour to download a 4 to 6 MB issue and three times out of four it's incomplete, so I had to restart again because the PDF file corrupt! It's quite frustrating but I'm so much eager to read each issue that's it's just an inconvinience.

Keep up your good work

Clement

Peter -- i know tracking is important, but have you considered publishing using torrents? That way, people can all help get the issues out...

Peter -- i know tracking is important, but have you considered publishing using torrents? That way, people can all help get the issues out...

Hi Eric and Cor

As you know tracking is important as it quantifies the exact number of downloads which is useful information for potential advertisers. If I were an advertiser I would be detered if this information was not available.

I'm not really up to speed on a lot of web technology and am not sure what torrents are. Is it where several people have bits of the pdf file for downloading? I only had something like the latest six issues on www.uwpmag.com. The rest were downloadable from other websites of mine and didn't generate bandwidth problems.

Re the other hosts recomended (Servage and Powweb), I have e mailed their sales depts with the bandwidth requirements but have, as yet, not had any replies.

I'll keep you posted as to progress.

Best regards

Peter Rowlands

I am not an expert either ..

.. but wouldnt an RSS fed torrent (torrent being just a method of download) be just as trackable as a download ?

Sites like google analytics and feedburner give statistics of subscribers to feeds. It is this sort of problem that torrenting was invented for is it not. Except on a larger scale.

It may even make the product easier to downlaod as you could subscribe in your torrent software to the feed, and when a new issue was brought out it would automatically start to download in the background. The tacking would count how many people are subscribed as well as how many visitors clicked to download once ... at least i think thats how it works.

However the bandwidth would only be saved if seeding happened .. which may not occur on the older issues, but should definately help on more recent ones which i imagine are the bandwidth pigs ?

Hi Peter

I had the exact same problem with Heart Internet. They dropped my site and refused to refund me even though I was only 2 months into a 12 month contract for unlimited bandwidth use and for which I had paid in advance for the whole year. I've been rowing with them ever since.

Many cheap hosting companies have clauses in them to exclude any form of mass downloading which is a real pain for things like videos and your mag if it's downloaded as a file as they use so much bandwidth.

I switched to Dataflame (www.dataflame.co.uk) and so far I've had no problems with them at all, although they are not the cheapest around. They did suspend my account once, but that apparently was by accident and once notified they sorted it out.

Another option could be Wagsy? Part of his Aussie Empire includes web hosting. I'm sure he'd try to sort you out a good deal if you PM him

Cheers, Simon

Hi Simon

Sorry to hear you had a similar problem. The small print makes interesting reading. FYI here's the small print from www.servage.net

Some web hosts claim that they offer unlimited or unmetered bandwidth. Bandwidth and traffic cost money and tie up server resources, so if any host truly offered unlimited bandwidth at any price they would not be in business for very long. If you read their Terms of Service, you will find the following language or something similar:

"If at any time the Customer’s website generates enough bandwidth usage to affect the performance of other customer sites on the server, we reserve the full right to terminate the Customer’s domain name without refund."

I'll follow up on your other suggestions and keep you posted.

Regards

Peter Rowlands

I am not an expert either ..

 

Hi Giles

 

Blimey. You certainly sound like an expert to me! Most of that RSS stuff went clean over my head. I will however forward your info/suggestions to my friend who handles the tech side of the website.

Many thanks for your input

Regards

Peter Rowlands

I use

http://csoft.net/index.html.en

Haven't read the small print...

As the rest, I'm no expert but T1 rates have fallen dramatically over the last couple of years here in the US. I've heard of rates as low as $200 a month. I'm not sure what these sites charge to host but if it were me, I'd buy the hardware, lease a T1 and do it myself.

Hi Peter,

It's sad to see such a good read having such problems. I always enjoy the new editions... I suppose I'm partially to blame for the predicament then. Well, hopefully I can share part of the solution too then.

I think what Eric was alluding to earlier is a piece of web technoloy call BitTorrents (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent). Using BitTorrent you could effectively spread the cost of the reader-base of UwP's downloads over that same reader-base... the first few people would download the PDF off your site, then second batch off the first and so on and so on (I like to visualise it as some kind of virus spreading through different hosts).

Hope that can be of some use.

Good luck!

G