PD has become too popular. Need help!

[pea]

Actually reducing the quality of the background image helped a lot. 85% of the bandwidth is used by normal PHP files though. Nothing we can do about that.

[ka0s0verdrive]

one thing that could cause alot of help in reducing traffic, is to allow the forum to be viewable only to registered members. frankly, i've browsed just about everything on here, and most of the posts aren't locked to regged users... if the aim is to keep this type of forum a "those in the know, know, those who don't, don't." to increase "security" then the natural groove would be to lock it down to registered only users, for one.

another suggestion: get rid of that horrid facebook-esque bar down at teh bottom of the page... that's gotta be a drain on server load...

and the final suggestion for the admins: place a "dump email" as a paypal recipient email, so that those of us with spare monies can start helping to keep this place alive.

I have other suggestions, pea, as a former forum owner, if you'd like to PM or email me.

[hacked_13]

@ka0s.

FB thing is diabled by 90% of the users. (in ur CP) btw

[pea]

No it's not. Quite a lot of people use it actually (and I'm the one who knows).

[hacked_13]

well i dont use it. and im the only one that counts

[steelreserve]

I would imagine a lot of the traffic is from people downloading from your site (For example eve's 0km patch) A good idea would be to only allow downloads from registered users while allowing unregistered users to still view the threads.

I know I just recently registered but have been floating around the forums for some time and downloading a lot. Not a permanent fix by any means but could allow you more time to search for a more cost effective host.

Also I would consider disabling certain types of traffic (ICMP for example) a simple port scan of publicdemands.co.uk shows a huge list of open and unsecured ports have you considered locking some of them down?

[pea]

The most bandwidth is used downloading simple PHP pages. And we do only allow registered people to download.

[Jackle]

Not to resurrect an old topic (Was just glancing through and this was at the top of this category), but I actually think that locking down the forums to only registered users might help out a lot. Think about this:

1) Before I registered, I looked around on this site a lot. Basically I was using bandwidth on something that I didn't even register for.

2) Game corps can send people to look over the site without ever registering.

3) Not 100% sure about this one, but if I am correct, every time Google bot, or another search engine site crawls the page, even though the bot only sees text, the server running it downloads the entire page (hence why you can look at a cached page on google). Considering how much google probably crawls this site, that could be using up quite a few resources.

Like I said, number 3 is just a theory. Also, I used to volunteer at a free webhost (post 2 host) before it went under, and we used an open source firewall designed for Cpanel. It was called CSF Firewall. youropensource.com/projects/410-Install-CSF-Firewall-for-Cpanel (was gonna post as a link, but I am not allowed to yet) And it closed down a lot of the ports, and we saw huge reductions in our bandwidth usage. I cannot remember the name of the company that we were hosted through, but if I recall a decent dedicated server runs like 80$ a month, not too bad I suppose.

I might do the VIP thing, once I am back at work in August

may PD and RR live forever

Jackle

[username]

I'd say force registration for any page other than general chat, registration really doesn't take long.


If not:
Not to steal people's fame but you can ask the creator of 0km (not to be rude but I have a shit memory) if you can upload his .exe to sharecash.org and show that link to NON-registered users. Those who register get to download it straight off the board but have to reply to the topic to show the attachment. This can be repeated for any other program that's in popular demand.

If you get enough from sharecash, give the excess to the creators of the programs (donation or otherwise)

That way:
- They make some cash of their free programs which remain technically free

- You make cash off the lazy mofos that eat your traffic and pay for whatever hosting you need.

- Registered users are happy because they have more rights than non-registered peeps.

Just my 0.02 :P