Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

For those of you that have any interest, I thought I'd put up a graph of our CPU usage for the forum.

This is the percentage of the CPU usage over the last 350 days, notice at around the 150 day mark, this was when we released the IBC of aquaponics document, sharp increase and on the rise ever since.

The other day our man Callum updated the forum and this sent the CPU usage up to 611%. Our webhost shut the site down before we crashed the server. Evidently we aren't really supposed to go over 100%





It looks like we'll have to increase the hosting package again.. This is going to lead to a big increase in costs so I'm looking at setting up some google ads for those people that aren't members to try and help cover some of the increased costs. I didn't want to go the way of any advertising but I think this will have to be done. Members logged in won't see a thing, but those just visiting will have adverts amongst threads.

Wow, thats pretty cool stuff, I definately remember that spike around xmas holidays - it was nuts.

In regards to the whole advertising thing - I personally dont care, I am here to seek information and share the love of all things AP and if that means a bit of adverising to help pay the bills and keep this knowledge centre afloat...well thats alright with me.

A lot of other forums require member and subscription fees.

We're not like other forums.....

I'm with you Charlie. Besides, ads are gr8 for newbies (ie us) as they give ideas and alternatives and also, can help in sourcing items etc

google might even serve up ads for some of those, er, "helpful" e-books alongside forum posts ...

Well I'm just glad I'm a member... because I can't stand bloody ads....

In fact I'm seriously thinking of abandoning google over it's latest privacy and adware bombardment policies...

Not so long ago... pop-ups were considered a security risk... and the domain of sleazy adware spammers...

Now they're part of normal sleazy business practice... and thus the "norm"

(No offence meant to BYAP... and I understand the reason/need to go down tthis path)

Adverts don't really bother me, but as Boris points out, from BYAP's point of view, you have no control over what adverts appear.
Good luck with it though, will be interesting to see how much revenue it generates.

Cool
Bouncing buttocks and oversized boobies, and they want to be friend

or i could just log on

We do appreciate your efforts Joel, whatever it takes,

You can ban certain domains, so sorry Matthew if I see the BB's and OB's I'll have to ban them, even though they are your potential friend..

I think we were paying about $700 a year, now the people we host through don't have the plans they used to, their new cloud servers start at $275 a month for their lowest plan..

Ouch

What are the details of BYAP's current plan Joel (disk quota, bandwidth limits etc.)?
Are you on shared hosting, VPS or dedicated server?

Hard to remember all the info because they have removed their plan details from the main site..

Space - 25GB we use about 18
Bandwidth - 500GB we use 400-450 ATM

We were supposed to be on a shared server, but only with one other person so we have 50% of the CPU..

Just a thought, but you could offer a paid membership that is add free. All other visitors, registered or not, would see adds. That way, people can choose to support the site by buying a membership, or continue to enjoy access for free and just deal with the adds.
Personally, if I can continue to use a forum for free, I don't mind adds. Forums don't run themselves...

One thing that i have seen is the forum called for donations to maintain it. Then after someone had made a donation they got a little picture above their avatar showing they helped support the forum. Every year the money was raised because people wanted the site to keep running. That was with a much smaller user base than this forum too. I think annually it was about $700 and an additional $3000 i think it was was raised to pay for a server box upgrade one year. They ran their own server rather than renting server space though. I know i would be happy to chip in to help cover cost. I like this forum