Leaving FutureQuest

[kennylucius]

I decided a few days ago to leave FQ. I regretted the need to do so at the time, and now I regret it even more.

I recently converted my site to MediaWiki, and as the spiders work their way through the site causing caches to fill and image thumbnails to be created, my disk space allotment is far behind me. I expect it to get worse. The cost to upgrade my hobby from Pioneer to Trailblazer is just too much for my wife to tolerate

I opened an account at Lunarpages when they assured me that PHP 5 and MySQL 5 were just an email away. I should have run the other way when my pre-sales question was answered with a ticket: the words supposedly typed by a human were sandwiched between numbers and codewords generated by software to be read by more software. I felt sorry for the poor human, her scripted message echoing down the corridors of the Borg ship.

I requested my new account be moved to a server with the advertised PHP 5 and MySQL 5. I received several canned replies designed to give the impression that people are working on something. More than 24 hours later, I decided to run. I sent the email canceling the account to billing and received an email from support with more ticket numbers. Within 5 minutes the requested move was completed. I'm not saying there's a connection between my leaving and the sudden completion of the open ticket, but...

Now I'm thinking of trying HostGator. (I'm not going to wait for the refund--I'd like to get this over with.)

Anyone have a suggestion for a host that isn't horrible? I at least 1 Gb of space for $15/mo. I use hardly any bandwidth--a few hundred Mb. It probably seems weird to need so much space for so little bandwidth, but I'm not serving up video here. It's a research site with a lot of information that is rarely accessed.

I'm not really expecting any suggestions--I just wanted to get this off my chest: Dang it, FQ! You've ruined me for any other host!!!
Kenny Lucius

[Jeff]

The issue I see is that if you're filling 1 GB of space with the cached images from mediawiki, I imagine when spiders go through the wiki it will generate a ton of CPU load. I fear that with many of the "cheap huge amount of disk space" hosting accounts, you will run into processing resource limits that could result in account suspension, etc. since MediaWiki is known for being resource intensive...

[kennylucius]

Actually, the site gets relatively little traffic. Event with bots, it rarely serves up 10K pages/day. With Mediawiki, a page is dynamically generated only when it changes, otherwise the html is cached and served up with little overhead.

Anyway, I have good news and bad news.

The good news is that I probably overestimated the space needed. I think I can shoehorn the site into Prospector's 900 Mb. That will put off the need for a better solution for a while. Maybe FQ will up the disk space again soon.

The bad news is that every other host I looked at sounded like a borg ship. Even hosts charging similar rates didn't compare. FQ is unusually open and visible for a web host. I didn't run across a single one with a forum where staff discussed the problems they were having and how they were solving them. For some reason, that is very important to me.

I suppose the bad news is also the best news, because I'm staying with the best for a while longer.

My philosophy (I'll try to keep it brief ) is that my money is like a vote, or a judgement. I hate buying anything from an organization that obviously cares only for profit and has no pride. Sometimes I have no choice, but I really try to reward good work when I find it. To that end, FQ is welcome to my $27/month until my wife finds out

[Jeff]

With 10,000 page views a day or even half that, if we're talking about the site in your signature, I can't believe that it's not monetized to easily generate the hosting cost in just a day or two -- that would seem a goldmine for both ad revenue and referral fees!

Glad to hear that mediawiki isn't as resource-hungry as I had feared. I just started with it this week, and was told it's quite a resource-consumer compared to vBulletin for example

[hobbes]

Glad to hear you're staying, but I wouldn't count on a disk increase in the near future. The last increase was just a couple of months ago.

[kennylucius]

Jeff, I meant to say that 10,000 page views is the busiest it ever gets, and that's only when Google and Yahoo are really going at it. Real people only view 1 to 3 thousand a day.

I tried AdSense and some associations like Amazon. It never returned more than advertising costs, but it might amount to a significant portion of the hosting cost. We'll see how it works out.

Hobbes: You're not nearly as glad as I am

[kitchin]

Maybe you should change the title of this thread! (If possible.)

[Evoir]

Your site should be making money. It's a pretty neat idea.

[kennylucius]

I think most of the people browsing the site are researching stuff rather than shopping. Libaries use it to make their purchasing decisions, but they don't always buy from Amazon. The AdSense ads are mostly kinda lame. For a while, all the ads were for buying roulette wheels or bowling trophies--not exactly what literati are looking for...

Perhaps I'm not a very good marketer. I always recovered the advertising, but not much more.

[Jeff]

I don't know much about adsense (I think others here can probably offer much better advice), but I just placed adsense ads on my Powerboat Listings site and with right around 1,000 visitors and 4,000 page views per day on the pages the adsense code is currently displayed on, they are bringing in on average $3.75/day. I don't think the ads shown on my site now are particularly profitable compared to other topic areas, but maybe they are...

I would really think given the content of the site though, that amazon, BN, etc. referral fees would make a few times more than that, even given the reduced commissions per item now compared to a couple years ago.