What should we do? [Archive]

dhyatt

11-11-2008, 04:58 PM

Looking for some opinions on the users think CP should proceed given the latest communique from our web hosting company...
-----

Dear Don,

I have been watching your site's resource utilization and it is indeed higher than what is allowed from a shared account. Shared accounts are allowed to use 1% or less of the CPU. There are some fluctuations in the resource usage. I've seen the account get as low as 4.7% CPU utilization and as high as 9.5%. We do offer a semi-dedicated plan which allows for up to 5% of all resources. If your site is able to remain at or below that level then this plan would be ideal. More information about it is available here:
http://www.westhost.com/semided-business-hosting.html

We also have managed dedicated servers available and can automatically transfer your account onto your server for you. More information is available at http://dedicated.westhost.com/.

Unfortunately we're not able to continually offer these higher amounts of resources for a shared account. Please let me know if you're interested in working to reduce the resource usage of your account or if you will be upgrading to one of our higher level services.

If you have any questions please contact me. If I am unavailable feel
free to contact our technical support department at
http://members.westhost.com/contactus.html .

Best regards,

Morgan Smith
Jr Systems Administrator
WestHost

</pre>

DarylB

11-11-2008, 05:59 PM

Obama to sign CaryPolitics.Org bailout package

By Daryl Baker, Associated Press Writer – <ABBR class=recenttimedate title=2008-11-11T12:46:15-0800>1 hr 56 mins ago

Cary, NC - CaryPolitics.Org's requested bailout package was submitted to the full United States House of Representatives (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_of_Representatives). The original proposal was three pages. The purpose of the plan was to purchase additional bad information, promulgate useless propaganda by liberals overrunning the site, and to restore confidence in the truly deme (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_market)nted. The text of the proposed law was expanded to 110 pages and was put forward as an amendment.[1] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailout_of_U.S._financial_system_(2008)#cite_note-HCFS-Amendment_to_HR3997-2008-09-29-0) The amendment was rejected via a vote of the House of Representatives on Niovember 11, 2008, by a margin of 228-205.[2] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailout_of_U.S._financial_system_(2008)#cite_note-1)
On November 12, 2008, the Senate (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate) debated and voted on an amendment, which substituted a newly revised version of the CaryPolitics.Org Stabilization Act of 2008 for the language of H.R. 1424.[3] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailout_of_U.S._financial_system_(2008)#cite_note-LOC-THOMAS-HR1424-2)[4] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailout_of_U.S._financial_system_(2008)#cite_note-Senate_CBHUA-Amend_HR1424-2008-10-01-3) The Senate accepted the amendment and passed the entire amended bill by a vote of 74-25.[5] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailout_of_U.S._financial_system_(2008)#cite_note-4) Additional unrelated provisions added an estimated $150 billion to the cost of the package and increased the size of the bill to 451 pages.[6] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailout_of_U.S._financial_system_(2008)#cite_note-NYT-Hulse-Vote_count-2008-10-01-5)[7] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailout_of_U.S._financial_system_(2008)#cite_note-6) with additional earmarked provisions. The amended version of H.R. 1424 was sent to the House for consideration, and on November 13, the House voted 263-171 to enact the bill into law.[3] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailout_of_U.S._financial_system_(2008)#cite_note-LOC-THOMAS-HR1424-2)[8] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailout_of_U.S._financial_system_(2008)#cite_note-7)[9] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailout_of_U.S._financial_system_(2008)#cite_note-NYT-Herszenhorn-2008-10-03-8) President Obama signed the bill into law within hours of its enactment, creating a $700 billion Troubled Website Relief Program (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Assets_Relief_Program) to purchase failing web pages.[10] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailout_of_U.S._financial_system_(2008)#cite_note-Associated_Press-Raum-2008-10-03-9)
According to the Centralia Chronicle, 700 billion dollars would cover a football field in 4 feet 10 inches deep in one hundred dollar bills.
Proponents of the bailout plan argued that the Blog intervention (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_intervention) called for by the plan was vital to prevent further erosion of confidence in the U.S. blogosphere and that failure to act could lead to webwide political depression (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_depression). Opponents objected to the massive cost of the sudden plan, pointing to polls that showed little support among the public for bailing out Don Hyatt, sometimes popular poitical junkie and "political analyst",[11] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailout_of_U.S._financial_system_(2008)#cite_note-LAT_20080904-10) and claimed that better alternatives were not considered[12] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailout_of_U.S._financial_system_(2008)#cite_note-11) and that the Senate only tried to force the passage of the unpopular but sweetened (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_barrel) version of the bailout through the opposing House and was successful in this attempt.[13] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailout_of_U.S._financial_system_(2008)#cite_note-12)[14] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailout_of_U.S._financial_system_(2008)#cite_note-fitsnews1-13)

Don

11-11-2008, 06:12 PM

Looking for some opinions on the users think CP should proceed given the latest communique from our web hosting company...
<hr>

Dear Don,

I have been watching your site's resource utilization and it is indeed higher than what is allowed from a shared account. Shared accounts are allowed to use 1% or less of the CPU. There are some fluctuations in the resource usage. I've seen the account get as low as 4.7% CPU utilization and as high as 9.5%. We do offer a semi-dedicated plan which allows for up to 5% of all resources. If your site is able to remain at or below that level then this plan would be ideal. More information about it is available here:
http://www.westhost.com/semided-business-hosting.html

We also have managed dedicated servers available and can automatically transfer your account onto your server for you. More information is available at http://dedicated.westhost.com/.

Unfortunately we're not able to continually offer these higher amounts of resources for a shared account. Please let me know if you're interested in working to reduce the resource usage of your account or if you will be upgrading to one of our higher level services.

If you have any questions please contact me. If I am unavailable feel
free to contact our technical support department at
http://members.westhost.com/contactus.html .

Best regards,

Morgan Smith
Jr Systems Administrator
WestHost

</pre>

If I read this right you have too much "stuff". You either need to have a yard sale to get rid of the stuff you no longer need, or buy a storage unit to put the stuff in which costs more $. Personally, I like the yard sale - but it's your stuff.

Belle

11-11-2008, 07:25 PM

Would it work to automatically retire posts to a black hole after a one year period?
How much space do you pick up that way?

Relatedly, is it a traffic/access problem, or a storage problem?
If it's a traffic problem, I'd go with another hosting service or plan. Growth is good in this case.

We are personally very happy with Network Solutions and have developed a number of websites for people using them, without complaints, for reasonable costs.

MM

DarylB

11-11-2008, 10:19 PM

....or perhaps you could go with (drum roll please)....YELLOWDOG.COM. I hear they give discounts for Progressive candidates and causes, and lord knows CP qualifies as a liberal haven these days!

http://web.archive.org/web/20070609164617/http://www.wakeupyellowdogs.com/images/yellow_dog_480.jpg

d4vendel

11-12-2008, 07:08 AM

Given our current usage, it appears that a semi-dedicated plan would not be sufficient. On the other hand, with the election over, do we expect traffic to stay at the levels we have seen recently?

It looks like to go to a dedicated server we would either have to increase ad revenue, implement user membership fees, or a combination of both. If anyone here expects you (Don) to continue to pay for all of the service out of your own pocket, well I can only assume that they have bought into the whole "redistribution of wealth" ideal. I have not. People should be willing to pay their own way for things that are important to them.

As I have said before about CP - everyone has a right to free speech. No one is obligated to provide anyone with a forum for doing so for free.

Do you have detailed statistics that show which individuals use the most resources? I think it would be interesting to see how the usage of CP breaks down.

Brent

11-12-2008, 07:22 AM

Well said by David. A dedicated server might be overkill today, but the semi-dedicated server seems like it would, at most, buy time.

Quite a few people ("Site Supporters", not to mention a few advertisers) have already ponied up some funds. Perhaps more aggressive ad marketing, combined with annual memberships, would cover increased costs.

I think it would be interesting to see how the usage of CP breaks down.

The usage of CP breaks down when too many people try to use it at the same time. ;) :D (sorry, couldn't resist).

Hyatt, I do have one question: How is it that having 1,000 or so guests online seems typical? I can't believe that that many people are constantly viewing CP. I assume that much of this traffic is bots or crawlers or something? Can that traffic be reduced? Would that solve the problem?

chaboard

11-12-2008, 07:59 AM

Hyatt, I do have one question: How is it that having 1,000 or so guests online seems typical? I can't believe that that many people are constantly viewing CP. I assume that much of this traffic is bots or crawlers or something? Can that traffic be reduced? Would that solve the problem?

I've often wondered the same thing. I've also noticed that I remain an "active user" if I simply leave a browser window open to the site.....is there a corresponding actual active "connection" of some sort that is kept open and might have some small associated overhead? If so, might a crude timeout of some sort alleviate some load?

d4vendel

11-12-2008, 08:18 AM

Excellent point about the timeout. Booting people off after 30 minutes of inactivity seems reasonable to me if that will cut down on the traffic.

Can we stop the bots by having a login screen as the default page? We could still allow guest, they would just have to log on using "guest" and a password that consists of one of the "type these characters" boxes (the technical term for which escapes me. I am only on my second cup of coffee.)

Maybe leave some basic info on the front page, but require authentication to proceed to looking at the forums.

DarylB

11-12-2008, 09:31 AM

To the Moderators/owners of CP (I guess):

I'll probably get hammered for this, but hey, what else is new...

I'm just not sure why you're putting this out on the CP Personal and Confidential section, when it seems like this is stuff for your moderators forum. We certainly don't get asked when our posts are censored, or when we get assigned a penalty, or points, and we're not privy to the moderators discussions about the operation of the website. Bottom line, we "users" don't have much in the way of a voice in how you run your site, and I'm not sure why, in view of that history, you're interested in our input now on how to run bandwidth issues. If you're going to be wanting money now (as it seems that's a concern), and that is certainly seemingly part of the "change" you're going to be asking for, isn't any money exchanged for site support also likely to mean shares of ownership in the "company", or at least a voice in its operation? Or do we need to hold an election for representation on a board of directors, or proxies, or .... I think I've got some Acorn voter registrations around here somewhere, and some slightly modified Diebold equipment we could use! 8O Should it be a concern to the interests of CP who then begins to "buy" the CP voice you've created?

Another consideration, if you do start taking money, there's that whole issue we just faced of FEC regulation and advertising disclosures, and you know that there are going to be those who will be paid to advertise their opinions in a political forum. If the issue of banner ads got intricate in detail as to what forms to use and what rates to charge to whom, you'll drive an accounting firm nuts with this one. A rather nasty thicket to try and maneuver through, it would seem. But then, I just write stuff.

dhyatt

11-12-2008, 10:25 AM

Here's some more information that may help: About 30% of the total traffic on CP is due to some 46 different bots that index the site & gather RSS feeds. I've added code to the server configuration that keeps them throttled so they don't wind up denying service to legitimate users. I've also instituted a robust robots.txt file that is supposed to limit what they actually index. Several of the bigger search engines seem to mostly ignore the restrictions. During the day, CP serves an average of 8,000-10,000 pages an hour, 40% normal known users, 30% search engines, 20% as a result of various search hits from around the world, and 10% which are basically hack attempts.

The "Who's Online" box reflects unique user's within the last 4 hours. It does not use any resources per say and simply being logged on does not use resources. Server resources are only used when serving actual content.

About 20% of the resource load is from serving pictures and that's more or less normal. I can turn on some page caching but that means posts won't be reflected on the homepage immediately which isn't particularly user friendly. I'm generating some detailed log files which may help identify to ineffeciencies in the site layout so perhaps something useful will turn up there.

To address Daryl's comments:
Site moderation is totally separate from site operations. We have a moderators forum for two main reasons: #1) None of us can be online 24x7 so we share the burden of making sure spam, porn, etc... don't show up on the site. We have done a good job of keeping that in check. #2) It's good to have a diverse set of opinions when dealing with politically and personally sensitive issues. I have a reputation to maintain as do all users of CP. It's somewhat difficult to balance freedom of speech with keeping us out of the Kos-style mud. To that end, we have a small group that helps to maintain order while providing as much free rein (or reign, take your pick) as practical. The Moderators group is small in order to avoid it becoming just another venue for 'urinary confrontations' :-)

I have no desire to charge any kind of a membership fee because as Daryl rightly points out, it could easily turn into a mess. I'm already struggling with how to handle paid advertisement vs. simple tax deductible donations and am seeking some advice on that front.

I'm very interested in all user input on both how to run the site, both mechanically and philosophically. There are some specific boundaries I won't cross and I think everyone knows what they are but if not, let's discuss.

Technically, CP should have a Board of Directors and it has been mulled over on a couple of occasions but it's something I just haven't taken the time to push through.

I hope this answers most of your questions.

chaboard

11-12-2008, 11:01 AM

During the day, CP serves an average of 8,000-10,000 pages an hour, 40% normal known users,

Wow. I knew I was addicted but I'm pretty sure no more than 5000 of that is me. I swear!

Oh, wait, I'm not allowed to swear.

So Don - what's the financial hit for upgrading as they suggest? Is it something that could be covered by semi-annual contributions of $25 or $50 by known Site Supporters or are we talking serious money?

Have you Bushies considered hitting up Paulson for CP's share of the bailout? ;)