Racketboy Will Be Upgrading Server Relatively Soon

Post by **racketboy** » Thu May 22, 2008 8:45 am

Just wanted to give a heads-up that it looks like I will be breaking free from standard shared servers in the near future.
I'm already maxing out the bandwidth on my current shared hosting plan (100GB a month), but that isn't my biggest concern.
With the forum growing and the resource-intensive game database coming around the corner, I will need more processing power and also need more reliability.

I'm planning on moving to the "Personal" Virtual Private Server with my friends at A Small Orange
http://www.asmallorange.com/services/vps/

I love their customer service, so the added reliability of this new plan will hopefully complete the package of a perfect hosting solution for me.

most of you probably don't care about this, but I just thought I'd mention it

Post by **HeavyMetalMe** » Thu May 22, 2008 9:37 am

You don't want to consider us an "Enterprise"? "Personal" just makes us sound like bastard children or something

Post by **racketboy** » Thu May 22, 2008 10:29 am

HeavyMetalMe wrote:You don't want to consider us an "Enterprise"? "Personal" just makes us sound like bastard children or something

I'm not sure why they named it "Personal". Nobody's gonna use a VPS for a "personal" website.
That's what Shared is for.

If it makes you feel any better, I'll be upgrading from the "Super" shared plan:
http://www.asmallorange.com/services/hosting/

Post by **marurun** » Thu May 22, 2008 11:43 am

Well, I hope ads and donations are covering your monthly costs OK. How's traffic these days, anyway? Has Together Retro boosted visits and traffic or did you get better spikes with the other articles, like Hidden Gems?

Post by **peace4myheart** » Thu May 22, 2008 11:51 am

Yeah, I was thinking about that too. Are you making a profit out of this or are you just doing it out of the goodness of your heart and pocket??? Hope you don't have to spend money on this website and that the ads are enough to pay for it instead.

Post by **racketboy** » Thu May 22, 2008 12:11 pm

marurun wrote:Well, I hope ads and donations are covering your monthly costs OK. How's traffic these days, anyway? Has Together Retro boosted visits and traffic or did you get better spikes with the other articles, like Hidden Gems?

Overall traffic has been slowly growing. Right now I’m running at about 7,000 uniques a day and about 23,000 page views a day. This is in comparison to about 6,000 uniques and 15,000 page views at the beginning of the year.

Ad revenue has been enough to fund hosting, pay for development costs (the game database will run about $2,000 by the time it’s where I want it to be for official launch) and leave a nice chunk of money to reimburse myself for my time and effort. (Actually, I’ve been using the extra money to help my wife quit one of her jobs and start her own site) of course, it took three years or so for the content to pay for itself -- the store paid for everything before that.

There are really three major types of traffic:
Direct traffic: this is the core community that is all of you regulars that manually come to the site via bookmarks, RSS feeds, etc. This accounts for about 13% of my overall traffic. Together Retro has helped with that. Together Retro really helped the forum more than anything -- which was one of my goals. Over the last few months that we have been doing Together Retro, Direct traffic has been up about 10% and page views is up about 20%. Not bad at all over the course of just a few months.

Search traffic: This actually accounts for about 54% of my overall traffic and I’m guessing is where most of my ad revenue comes from. Over the last few months, it has risen about 30% This is probably due to new content showing up in Google and more people linking to useful articles (and helping Google rankings)

Referral Traffic: this is when people come via links on Digg, Stumble Upon, or other sites and forums. This is about 33% of my overall traffic. This really fluctuates depending on if I have something on Digg or not. Digg really skews these stats as it sends a flood of visitors. On average, however, referall traffic has been pretty steady.

From the stats that are public on the net, it looks like we are one of the most popular sites when it comes to old-school gaming. The only gaming sites that really blow us away in terms of traffic are the large mass-market gaming sites like Gamespot, IGN, Joystiq, Kotaku, Destructoid, etc But when it comes to independent, niche gaming sites, we’re high up there.

I actually don’t want us to become “mainstream”. Growth is good, but only if its from the kind of audience that keeps the community tight-knit and strengthen the niche content. If we can make classic gaming more mainstream, that’s fine, but I’m not about to cater to more mainstream gaming.

Post by **racketboy** » Thu May 22, 2008 12:16 pm

peace4myheart wrote:Yeah, I was thinking about that too. Are you making a profit out of this or are you just doing it out of the goodness of your heart and pocket??? Hope you don't have to spend money on this website and that the ads are enough to pay for it instead.

\

Of course it started as doing it just for the love of the topic, but I am making a profit now. I'm curious how to averages out per hour of work I've put into it over the last four years though

I'll tell you what though -- don't plan on running a site for very long if you don't love the content and the community. It's very challenging to keep a good pace going -- especially if its not your full-time job.

As my wife is learning with her site, it takes quite a while (or a ton of luck) before you can really make much money online.

So when it comes down to it, I do this out of love and the eventual profit is just a nice side effect

Post by **Abras** » Thu May 22, 2008 12:21 pm

I think most forum members would agree with you on that last point Racket. Those big sites are full of trolling, spamming, and flaming jerks, while jerks are hard to come by around here. While I'm not religious I sincerely pray we can keep it that way

Post by **Mozgus** » Thu May 22, 2008 12:29 pm

I hope all the timeouts and other issues with the forum go away.

Post by **racketboy** » Thu May 22, 2008 12:37 pm

Mozgus wrote:I hope all the timeouts and other issues with the forum go away.

That's the goal.
But some of them may be out of my control.
Once we get the database up and running, I'll be upgrading to version 3 of phpbb, so hopefully that will help as well.
But since the game db user IDs are based off the phpbb forum ids, I can't switch yet.