DarkMatters and SacredWiki Proudly Hosted by Booyah Hosting

[gogoblender 3,070]

And there it is, waaaaay at the bottom center...our first ad Hosting costs have been rising pretty quickly over the last few months, and as you can imagine, with that success comes the extra bandwidth.

 

Fernis, who owns Booyah Hosting, has been working with us for over a year now, and is the epitome of superb customer service. He has helped us in our many moves and reincarnations, and now he's helped us take this extra step to a mid-level site. The two sites here, DarkMatters and SacredWiki now get almost 100000 unique visitors a month combined. What's happened is that the "draw" on both sites resources is slowly increasing, and with the Sacred 2 about to be released on many other gaming consoles, we are thinking that the community here will probably become even busier.

 

In planning for the future, we had to make a calculation of about how much bandwidth we think we would need, and how much we could possibly grow into over the next year. When we first noticed that the bandwidth was going to exceed limits, we began looking at commercial hosting, but as there are so many small things that always seem to happen with a site move, what we instead decided to do was see if there was a package being offered by any other hoster out there that could match our projected needs, with some decent pricing.

 

We then asked Fernis if he would match it.

 

And he did

 

So we're staying here, at home, and we have lots of extra power to keep things running smooth, as well as some extra for some of Schot's wild, wild projects.

 

The Booyah ad down at the bottom of the forum is going to occupy one third of the allotted space, with perhaps the other two thirds to both of it's sides being as banner space to be rented out perhaps by six month or one year contract.

 

We have been investigating many ways of keeping up with the costs, and while advertising via google and others is easy to do...it just wouldn't be the same for us, and probably for you. As a forum is very "click" heavy and highly dynamic, advertising on all of it's pages could/would probably take it's toll on the pleasure we all, as heavy readers, get from the site. This is why we are electing to go with banners, and as soon as we have pricing, we'll offer it first to anyone of our site's members here who perhaps have small businesses or ventures they wish to have advertised on DarkMatters. We won't be asking a lot for the space... we'd just want to defray costs. This is our hobby first and not really a business.

 

Perhaps more stronger advertising could find it's place on the Wiki, along the top, bottom, and perhaps on the sides? A wiki isn't as dynamic a medium as a forum is, and it would maybe work better there.

 

As well, we are considering a "Supporting Memberships" idea, where peeps can "buy" a tag that would show in their profiles here at DarkMatters when posting.

 

We'd probably have two prices...one for a month, and one for the year. The supporting membership wouldn't get you much in the way of extras...but it would be a way for members to help us out with costs if they're so inclined without us having to ask for donations, which is something we're very uncomfortable with

 

Again, thank you everyone who's been coming here for years now, and a great big welcome to the many, many new members who join up every day. The sites and this community are one of my own greatest personal pleasures these days, and all of you are a part of it.

 

Cheers!

 

 

gogo

[Schot 407]

Feels so strange now. I feel violated somehow, haha. Ah it was an eventually and we saw it coming. Now that we've committed to the concept of advertising as a means of keeping costs at bay we'll be looking for others ways to bring it down. Photobucket as an example is one way in which we opted to keep costs down in terms of bandwidth which is why you'll all notice that about 95% of images you view from the forum here and the wiki are hosted at photobucket. Even with nearly all images being hosted elsewhere we were encroaching our bandwidth limit with our host Booyah. We had a 50GB bandwidth limit and last month, January, we reached a scary point.... 36GB of our 50GB allowable. With the coming release of Sacred 2 for XBOX and sooner or later PS3 we needed to make a decision. Now imagine if we were actually hosting all images... Yikes! Booyah offered us a great deal which brought our bandwidth up to 100GB/month so we're breathing a bit easier now. At a cost however. But now I get to toy around with the extra bandwidth so woohoo! Annually, to give a general idea, we're paying about $471.00 CAN. This includes Booyah hosting, domain names, Maplib hosting, Photobucket Pro, IPB software upgrades and IPBwiki bridge. Worth every penny I might add. I love doing this and the experience has taught me SO much. But we wanna do more! Fact is that the reason we didn't do this sooner is because gogo and I were at odds about how we felt the best way to reduce costs would be. He opts for ads while I prefer the idea of a donations button. Basically a donations button is a smaller image. ^^ gogo's suggestion to create a special supporting membership as a means to recieve donations as well as us give a little something is a great idea and we're going to try and work that out. Nothing will be changed as it is presently. We're just going to add a bit more.

 

This is a huge step for us and it's very telling about how great this hobby has turned out. Loads of fun and truly a spirited community if ever I was a part of one. All we needs now are more gadgets and pizazz!

 

Thanks to all of you. You brought us to this point and it's quite exciting.