April 5, 2001

9:47 PM

TANGMONKEY.COMis suffering from server problems. Although their email system still works, I worry about the rash of personal sites (nosepilot/gisol.org, especially, comes to mind) that are going down due to traffic beyond the "moderate" level. The host that TM's using is charging them several hundred dollars as their <=100 hits/day equals > 30 gB outging traffic. What's the solution? Are there cheaper/better hosts? Should "personal" content sites start advertising? I can't imagine that helping...
posted by Marquis (4 comments total)

It's a sad state of affairs. I'd say the only thing a popular site can hope for is some sort of free/cheap hosting deal (like k10k). MetaFilter moves about 30Gb of text a month, and that's way beyond all the <$100 a month plans I've seen. My own colocation would be about $200 a month at the cheapest end, and around $600 at the highest end. This site wouldn't be up if it weren't for free bandwidth at pyra.

With the dot com shakeout, hosts and colocation facilities are going under as big ticket customers dry up, so this is only going to get worse.

My advice is to wish for obscurity. Run a static page on your home DSL and tell no one on earth about it.

btw, where is the full skinny on tangmonkey's server problems? I didn't see any details in the top post on the site.
posted by mathowie at 9:56 PM on April 5, 2001

I'm thinking some sort of peer to peer thing could fix this.

(Yes, I've got a "company" in that very same space. No, we don't have any money. Yes, I will accept small unmarked bills :)
posted by owillis at 11:39 PM on April 5, 2001

..I'm thinking some sort of peer to peer thing could fix this...

Wouldn't Freenet be a fix? I know that you can host sites on Freenet (even though it seems very awkward to do this). Its'
definitely not as easy to navigate as the web, but...
posted by the_ill_gino at 12:44 AM on April 6, 2001

You could always petition to join an elite squad of webfolk that happen to be a subsidiary of a pretty large hosting company, and get everything you need for free. It also helps that they do domain registration, too.
posted by endquote at 11:56 PM on April 6, 2001