Dear friends,
Well, the free ride is over. My company which has kindly hosted diyAudio for free for the past 3 years is now getting billed for bandwidth at US$3 / GB.
diyAudio uses 20GB a month presently and is growing at 2-3 GB per month. Last month the site served 1.3 million pages. That means I need to find AUS$200 a month (AUS$2400 a year), increasing each month, or find another host that will host it for free whilst at the same time providing a great level of service.
As I manage the box this is on (I am a linux network and sysadmin who specialises in Apache/PHP/MySQL) I know that the site is rarely down, that the drives are RAID, there are offsite tape backups, etc.
I would hate to move to another host with a lower level of service.
If I can't find a new host within a month I am going to have to either shut the site down (over my dead body!) or find some way to make it pay for itself. I simply can't afford $200 a month in my current financial situation.
I have been thinking about different kinds of advertiser sponsorship models, getting the community to donate, maybe some cafepress diyAudio Tshirts with a decent markup (US$1200/pa could be paid for with 120xUS$10 tshirt profits (or 60x$20).
But ideally I would just like to find another (decent) host.
Any suggestions welcome!
Well, the free ride is over. My company which has kindly hosted diyAudio for free for the past 3 years is now getting billed for bandwidth at US$3 / GB.
diyAudio uses 20GB a month presently and is growing at 2-3 GB per month. Last month the site served 1.3 million pages. That means I need to find AUS$200 a month (AUS$2400 a year), increasing each month, or find another host that will host it for free whilst at the same time providing a great level of service.
As I manage the box this is on (I am a linux network and sysadmin who specialises in Apache/PHP/MySQL) I know that the site is rarely down, that the drives are RAID, there are offsite tape backups, etc.
I would hate to move to another host with a lower level of service.
If I can't find a new host within a month I am going to have to either shut the site down (over my dead body!) or find some way to make it pay for itself. I simply can't afford $200 a month in my current financial situation.
I have been thinking about different kinds of advertiser sponsorship models, getting the community to donate, maybe some cafepress diyAudio Tshirts with a decent markup (US$1200/pa could be paid for with 120xUS$10 tshirt profits (or 60x$20).
But ideally I would just like to find another (decent) host.
Any suggestions welcome!