Hi guys.
You may have noticed that we had a little downtime today. You may have also noticed the reason why up there ^^ in the news ticker.
3500 stage managers in one space do a LOT of talking. Who knew? You guys are bestowing 10k-12k unique visits to the site per month, just over 2 million hits.
I'm pleased as punch that you love us so much. My webhost is also pleased as they think they can jack me up from a $10/mo plan to a $200/mo plan overnight. This is because we are putting about 10x the demand on the processor as most "normal" sites do. I do not intend to comply with their dastardly plans, but we do need to move from our current baby-bear server over to a mama-bear server with all due speed.
I've taken several steps to keep us up and running. You may notice some of them, others you won't:
- Calendar of events disabled
- Members who had not logged in for over 3 years and had never posted were deleted
- Avatar handling has been adjusted.
- I'm trying out Cloudflare to try and alleviate some of the demand on our server by distributing the load across many.
- I've reset "unread posts" markers for members who have been inactive for more than a month.
- List of "who's online" disabled.
- Chat disabled.
These methods may be enough. I'm seeing a big drop in server loads since I implemented the changes. However, given that webhosts like mine are built to kick their users up to the most expensive plans by design, I don't hold out much hope. Even if these stopgap measures are enough to keep us afloat for now, any future development to the site will be halted until we can expand our hosting capacity.
Therefore, in addition to slimming down features for the time being, I'm also researching new hosts. I'm hoping to transfer us to a more robust host without taking the hosting budget off the charts. The transfer research and move will likely take several days.
In the event that we have to move to a more expensive plan, I'm hoping to get some feedback from you guys. While I've accepted donations periodically (and am very grateful to the members who have donated!), I've pretty much covered SMNetwork out of pocket for the past 11 years. I've considered it my donation back to the theatre industry. However, there's a big difference between $200/yr and $500/yr. I'm hoping you can give me some feedback on how best to help defray some of these expenses.
EDIT: have fixed poll to allow up to 3 choices. I will only implement ONE of the choices.
EDIT to the edit for people finding this in the archives months later - we did move to a new server in March of 2011. A rapid-fire fundraising drive (detailed further on in this thread) raised about 2 years worth of hosting costs in less than four days. The need for ads & donation drives is not quite so intense at this point although it may become so again come 2013.