I remember you 'took down' FT during the Freddies 'webcast'.

My question is why is FT not on an outside server or at minimum on a dedicated server on a very high capacity line with cacheing?

Dorian

I can answer that. First of all,we've never hosted our server for FlyerTalk internally, feeling we needed an uptime that internal resources could not keep up with. We run a dedicated server with Verio. Verio is one of the larger Web farm companies out there and I beleive they were recently rated #1 in the Annual Boardwatch Survey. So it's not some rinky dink $19.95 a month hosting company. As an idea of the requirements of our traffic, our monthly bill from Verio is about $1,000 just to pay for the bandwidth. As for our dedicated server, it's a Sun Netra-T1 480mhz UltraSPARC-IIi which is the top of the line for this series. We will probably go with a UntraSPARC lll soon with the 600mhz processor. As for our bandwidth, well as you might expect, Verio provides us with a combination of redundant OC12, OC3, and DS3, but our real throughput is typically around 3mbps in real time. Now, I don't really know what these numbers and equipment mean other than I don't think we're operating FlyerTalk on a shoestring budget and old 286 server. I hope this answers any interest in this issue. We're finding out that the secret to optimizing Flyertalk isn't in the equipment, it's with the code hacking of the databases which run FlyerTalk. In the last week we've chatted with over 6 webmasters of sites in the same league as ours and they all say that any speed increase will only come with major work on code hacking the system. We are going to give it a try as we are commited to improving the speed and performance of FlyerTalk. While we orginally thought it was simply another board, our demo board which we experimented with last week was actually slower than the current board though it was touted as being faster (faster perhaps for 10,000 posts). In basketball it may be the shoes, but in this business it's the threads and we've got a lot of them (soon 500,000 of them). But our entire tech team has worked patiently the last few weeks with every solution we could find for increasing performance and we did find out that none of the solutions are easy. Some of the other webmasters said they have invested almost $100,000 in additional coding time to tweek their boards. We are up to the task.

[This message has been edited by Randy Petersen (edited 05-23-2001).]

Wow! Okay, excuse my ignorance...

I guess it is mainly the UBB software then...

Here is to hoping it gets changed out soon!

Dorian

In fact, we have considered using OpenTopic which is another UBB product but it seems also to have a few glitches. The problem there is it's cost. While someone with a new board can easily use that product if they have little traffic and minimal threads. Yesterday we chatted with them to again look over our traffic, our storage needs for all the threads we have and the growth pattern......Moving to OpenTopic would mean that our MONTHLY tab for supporting just the tech end of FlyerTalk would cost $8,666.67. That is an annualized tab of some $104,000. Let's make sure you are all aware of the monster that FT is as you comment on where we are with any changes. I will continue to fund FlyerTalk for the enjoyment and use for all of you and am more than glad to do so. After another meeting today on a few things, hope you'll be happy inside of a week or two as we finally announce things we've been working on. You've heard it all before...probably a long time ago. But time doesn't stand still for any of us.