Upgrading server to super duper dedicated, need opinions

[Tehtsuo]

I don't know about others' opinions, but it looks like you're looking for input, Ellay. Here's my .02

1) Adsense - Yes. This community needs to continue, and if generosity isn't footing the bill, use what does. A small minority of the community may be upset, but they'll still have a useful, and more reliable, resource to take advantage of, rather than one that's shut down or limited due to financial problems. However, if this comes to pass, I'd like the next suggestion to be implemented.

2) Monthly fee - And no, I'm not saying a monthly fee for all access. I'm talking about a very small 'premium' fee, between $1 and $2 a month. This will supplement the income from ads, and would result in an ad-free environment for subscribers. However, I do not believe the reward for a premium account should only be the removal of ads; because the multiboxing crowd is reasonably computer-savvy, it would take very little time for most to enable an ad-blocker or blacklist proxy rather than pay a monthly fee. Additional benefits such as a limited amount of storage space to upload images and a special title for subscribers would make it worthwhile beyond removing ads. Another idea that might be a lot of work but would really shine - a multibox-focused signature generator for subscribers. I've often wished to use one of those custom signature generators, but I don't want to end up with a 5-image thick signature (And yes, I'd gladly link to dual-boxing.com from my generated signature if I could use it on other forums). With all that extra value, you'd likely see a pretty substantial amount of subscriber traffic, but still be pulling in a respectable amount of ad revenue from people visiting to learn about multiboxing - all without restricting any actual content from the public eye.

3) Aggressive ad filtering - As a former webmaster, I know it's a very tall order to block out gold-selling ads, but I believe the attempt should be made. I would not be happy to be sending people here for information, insisting that multiboxing is legit, and having them see ads for gold-sellers. ;(

[not5150]

If you pick a VPS with too little allocated RAM then you'll start swapping when load gets high. Then you're basically back to square one.

[suprafro]

If you pick a VPS with too little allocated RAM then you'll start swapping when load gets high. Then you're basically back to square one.

?

You can just upgrade to a VPS with more memory whenever you want, with most hosts it's an automated process that mabey takes an hour or two for your server to be rebuilt

[Xar]

Hmmm, interesting that some of you that box would complain about a small subscription fee.

I'd be happy to subscribe, I'd even pay a year in advance. Give subscribers a title under their name or something cool like that.

There are no ads for me because I learned here about noscript and adblock to avoid keyloggers so they just aren't appearing and I never click on ads anyway.

[Sam DeathWalker]

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[not5150]

1-2 hours is way too long to deal with a Digg/Slashdot spike. Heck, our servers take 1-3 minutes for the cache to catch up and even that is too long to handle a traffic deluge.

We can take 1500 simultaneous users and we've spiked to 9000 users when serving from cache. With 256 MB of RAM, you are dead in the water after a few hundred people (especially on a mysql-based forum).

If it takes you 1 hour to recover from a spike, you will have lost thousands to tens of thousands of readers. You don't want to overbuild for this site, but you also don't want to cheap out and underbuild.

[Powerwar]

1 ) Put add sense
2 ) Open a special sponsored section in the forum where leveling and gold guides guys can post promo for their stuff.
3 ) Put AdBrite ads (banners mostly). Just make sure they are not very intrussive. They have flash gaming sites category, so you can put it and if a member wants to go and play some flash games while downloading the next big patch... then you get a coin and everyone is happy.
4 ) Contact blizzard about sponsor codes. People interested in multiboxing could register through them and you get some coin back.

5 ) Contact me and lets talk about business. I would be happy to sponsor this site if it has enough traffic and good audience.

[Urgas]

This site has been amazing to me as I was trying to get my 5-box setup. Thank you for making it the way it is. Adds won't bother me at all, and adds are most likely the easiest way to keep the site from being a major drain on you while still being available to everyone who wants to see it. I am not a big fan of adds, but I am less of a fan of monthly fees for websites. In the end its your website, so do what you got to do.

[Skuggomann]

[suport] :thumbsup: [/suport]

[Zite83]

If you place ads on the site, I will click them every day , its like donating to the site, but I don't have to spend the money I don't have.

When I worked on my old Asheron's Calls guild site www.minnietheminx.net which has been down for a long time now, the site had 1000+ members and many more guest. When the guest started becoming a problem and had to upgrade the host to a better package. I used ads which brought in about a whopping $3.00 - $10.00 a month didn't have google ads at the time. The ads never annoyed anyone because I made a hack for the CMS (XOOPS) based on group/member status and post status.

Logic of the hack was
if user id_postcount > ### (adblock = 0)
if user_group id < # (adblock = 1)

Worked great.. brought in money from the guest, while the vetern members never even noticed I placed ads on the site