Empeg BBS to disappear? Say it isn't so!

It could happen. Sooner than you think.

The subject line of this message isn't a joke. Some changes with PaulH's hosting provider means that he can no longer host this BBS free of charge. We need to find another host before the end of this month (July 2002), if not sooner. Paul is unlikely to be able to pay 50 quid a month to keep hosting it.

Options, anyone?

The provider must support PHP and MySQL, and will need to be able to handle the bandwidth requirements (currently about 5.5 gigabytes a month plus the email subscriptions it sends).

Sorry for the cross-post, I got caught in-between threads...

Unfortunatly that is likely to change now my provider wants to charge me to host the server. I am currently looking into options on what to do with this BBS.

Wow. That's sad news that they want to charge now. I hope you can work out some way to continue to have the BBS free of charge. If not, I think the options would be:

1) If the charges are reasonable, try to solicit donations from the BBS community. The people here have shown a willingness to support good projects with their hard-earned dollars (Mark Lord has received some donations, among many others who've sold empeg-related goods and services.) I am sure there would be a lot of support for a donation campaign if the costs were reasonable and we could be guaranteed the BBS would stay around.

2) Move the BBS to another server. RioCar.org would be the obvious first candidate, but I'll let Tom comment on how feasable that would be.

3) Transfer ownership of the BBS to someone else who has their own free hosting arrangements (or doesn't mind footing the bill.) That's the least preferable option if you ask me.

In any event I look forward to updates on this, and I hope you can find a way to keep the BBS as it is right now.

Tony, how large is the database?

85 megs at the moment. Of course it will expand as time goes on.

I already offered a donation.

If it ends up being hosted on RioCar.org's server, I would transfer ownership of empegbbs.com to Drakino. Or, I would continue to own it (and happily pay it) and just change the DNS servers.

I also have a 768k fractional T here that goes largely under-used, but I think hosting it at my office is a bad idea especially at 5.5GB per month.

I think lots of people would donate. How much is 50 quid anyway?

How much is 50 quid anyway?

According to http://www.xe.com/ucc/ about 76.8605 USD at current exchange rates...

I see. Well, my current provider, while not free, is $75 a year with pretty much unlimited disk space, and 6GB of transfer a month. I've had nothing but good experiences with them.

Of course, no matter what heppens, I'd be happy and willing to make a donation.

$76.85

The reason this cost is so high as it is to host a physical server. If a provider can be found to virtual host it then that may be cheaper.

Greetings!

Count me in for a donation, should you choose to stay here. Just tell me where to PayPal (or other service).

Put me down for a donation. I'll pick up the fee for the next month if we need the time to decide what to do.

I always prefer to stay here. You can send me all the money you like, anyway, though. You can send it to [email protected].

Oh, wait. You were probably talking to PaulH. Nevermind.

Is the 50 pounds on a month-to-month basis or is there a multi-month contract involved? The reason I ask is that I'll bet we could manage to pull together some funds on a temporary basis to make a decision and subsequent transition less rushed much more easily than providing monies on an ongoing basis.

I use Fast.net as my web host because they meet all the requirements I needed for UBBTHREADS. They have serveral plans and offer 24/7 tech support. They only allow you one mySQL database though... Are you guys confident that you can backup the entire board without any problems? I have tried to do a mySQL dump and restore it several times using myphpadmin and haven't been very successful! I wish you all the luck in the world backing up and restoring this great website. I really hope you don't lose any of the posts or messages, it would be horrible to lose all of the information on this site...

I'm good for a donation ... Surely there are at least 12 people willing to pay $75 each to keep things going for another year. I mean, we're all running around with a >$1000 car stereo. How many truly active members are there on the board these days?

Well I'll let everyone know about the possibility of moving it to RioCar.Org shortly.

Out of curiosity, how many would be willing to donate from time to time to help cover bandwith if it was moved? It's an idea that has been tossed around from time to time between me and the owner of the server with RioCar.org. Nothing mandatory, just something to help cover the costs of running the box. It was upgraded to a real server recently, so reliability should be fine.

Edit: the answer is yes. So Riocar.org is available

I would donate.

I would donate as well.

I should add that the web host that I use offers multiple mySQL databases, has everything you need to support a phpBB at least, and best of all, it's run by Brits!

[edit for add-on quote]
"I give you, Britania! With all the glitz and glamour of the British isles. Best of all, all the waitresses and show girls are real Brits! Straight from the streets of Sussex, they are!"
"Freshen your tea, govna?"

I just spoke to a good friend of mine who owns a dedicated server with RackShack. I've got him to offer a discounted hosting deal as a favour: $15 per month with 500MB of space and 20GB per month bandwidth. If you need extra space (within reason), I can probably negotiate that for no extra charge. The account would come with one MySQL account but you can have more if you want. The server's very sparsely populated (currently only one web site with another one or two going on sometime this month).

If you're interested, you can email me directly at [email protected]

Yeah, i'm a Starving College Student who's avoiding getting a summer job, but I'd definitly be willing to throw in some money, if no one comes forward who wants to host it... Don't we have sys admins who can throw a box on their network? The good old days, I guess... We can just make july pledge drive month, and find someone who's willing to collect money with a goal of being able to afford a years worth of hosting fees, I doubt it would take long... Are PaulH and Tony willing to continue with whatever arrangments they have for day to day and emergency duties if the community can come up with the $1000?

Whatever we do, can we just agree to avoid banner adds?

Matthew

Whatever we do, can we just agree to avoid banner adds?

I agree, I'll pay just to avoid those!

I'm trying to get together a co-location setup in chicago, where I can move my server to.. bandwidth in minnesota is just too expensive. I could possibly lost empeg bbs on my current colo. but If i could get a few more people together, I am looking at a full 42U rack space, with possibly 100mbit of bandwidth for around $2000-2500/month. I have about half the people needed to make this happen.. maybe people here would like to join the co-op. (if i can get 15 people, the price is only 150/month for around 5mbit of bandwidth)

I would donate also to keep it going.

I would certainly donate.

Yep .. I'm in (and there are a couple people off of my donation thread up above that said they would be in too).

Hi!

I would also give my contribution...

Alberto

Out of curiosity, how many would be willing to donate from time to time to help cover bandwith if it was moved?

I would donate. I have gotten so much more from this bbs than I will ever be able to repay...

But, if the bbs is to move to a new location, please give serious consideration to access speed. That's a function of bandwidth, I guess. With the volume of new posts to read every day (200+) a fat pipe is essential. I am on a T-1 line at work, and speed of the present connection is adequate, but no more than that. (Most likely the bottleneck is getting the signal in and out of Alaska -- I suspect my connection to the ISP is the fattest link in the whole chain.)

I mean, sure, we could host the bbs for free on a '486 with 8 MB of RAM running in somebody's attic on a 56K dialup... but we wouldn't want to.

tanstaafl.

Um, did you know that RackShack has gotten itself onto most of the anti-spam blocks? I'd doubt that 30% of the people who are on this BBS would be able to get e-mail from the BBS if it moves over to there.

Just my 2 cents.

Oh, and I'd donate to the BBS also.

Count me in to donate to the cause. It would be disasterous to our community if we lost it over a measly 50 quid a month. I'm sure there are enough of us willing to donate to keep it going if that's the only answer.

I would pick up a month of billage, let me know where when and how and I will contribute

Hi Tony,
well I manage the Servers of an ISP here in Switzerland.
So I have my own redhat linux Server connected to the Internet @ 2 Mbit/s.
I have mysql, php4, etc already on it and host about 80 Webs on that machine - the monthly traffic actually is about 12 to 15 Gigs.

What I want to say is: if you don't find any appropriate provider I can help out and host the BBS for... let's say half a year for free. So this would give you some time to find another solution.

Just mail me if I can be of any help.

btw: if you want to check ping times or so: www.guschti.ch

put me down for a donation, i dunno what i woudl do without the board, ill donate whati can afford a month.

First, be aware that I have no idea what I am talking about.

Isn't that a little steep for hosting? Here's a provider that is offering a gig of disk space and 30 gig of transfer for $40 yearly. Is this the right sort of thing?

Alright, here's my deal. I work at Net Access Corporation, a regional ISP in north Jersey, we cover the try-state area, and beyond with internet service. I've been here for a few years. We have about 20,000 dial up customers plus our dedicated customers. We have about 350 gigabits of band width in our one data center that i work at. I do all their web development, and in fact, in the company, there are about 7 empeg owners that i know of.

Depending on the space, I just spoke with the owner of the company and he said he would be happy to host this bbs.

10 gig of transfer per month with
200 meg of storage space for about
$500 per year.

I can assure you that the server will be monitored 24/7 by our staff, and would be hosted in our Colo Site A. We have NT, Unix and mac specialists here as well. My empeg site is hosted on my personal co-lo, and i do all the administration for that box. ( http://steve.nac.net/empeg )

http://www.nac.net/tour

Along with plenty of bandwidth, our peering groups are very large, and branch from our US data centers to London to extend our network into Europe. This would ensure that everyone can access the site without having to hop around too much, so it should be fast for everyone. for thoes techies, just do a tracert to www.nac.net.

http://www.nac.net/about.asp

Let me know if you guys are interested because we can just set up a pay pal account, or something. I'm sure if everyone chips in like $5 ( i will! ) then we might be able to keep this going for a few more years.

There is no doubt, that where ever you host this site, someone is going to pay for the bandwidth, somehow.

Oh, and hopefully everyone that currently moderates this site would still volunteer their time, right?

Any thoughts or comments?

Hi.

Well, the "club" where my domains are located (actually, I am one of the server admins there, it's a non-profit organization) provides some nice things to their members, among those:

• 1 free domain
• virtually unlimited webspace
• shared 2Mbit (both directions of course) line
• mail and news servers with remote access (pop3/nntp (with login)/smtp with smtpauth)
• shell access on the shared webserver, so virtually any program can be run (but some like IRC bots&bouncers are deprecated).
• dynamic dns
• VPN for static IP (thus making IRC bouncers unnecessary)
• SOCKS server
• Of course all requirements mentioned earlier are met: MySQL (one database with any number of tables and rows as long as MySQL supports it) and PHP (4.something, updated on request or when security updates are available) are of course available. (This entry inserted in post-posting editing)
  

for a little under 10EUR/month. Currently we have a 2Mbit line that is about 80% saturated, but the 5.5-6GB of this BBS will hardly get noticed, with our >10GB/day of traffic right now. The line saturation should go down considerably soon, when a new dedicated line for our usenet feeds gets connected.
I could ask the other admins and our "board of directors" if they would accept hosting the BBS for free, but I don't actually think they would agree to that. Send me an email if I should do this anyway.

cu,
sven

I'll help with some $'s too.

No offense, but that seems a little pricey to me! I mean, it's a lot of space and all, but regardless, I don't think we're going to be able to afford $500 a year!

And just out of curiosity, I always thought it was the "tri-state area", as opposed to the "try-state area." Just curious

In case anyone was actually interested in my own web host, here they are:
WiserHosting

Web Based Control Panel
6 GB Per Month Data Transfer
CGI-bin & Perl Support
ASP Hosting Support
PHP4 Scripting
Server Side Includes (SSI)
mySQL 3 Database Server
phpMyAdmin (Database Administrator)
MS FrontPage2000 Extensions
State Of The Art Data Centre
RAID 1 Hard Drive Redundancy
Multi High Capacity Connections
99.9% Web Server Uptime
30 Day Money Back Guarantee
Unlimited Web Space
20 POP3 Mailboxes
Web Based Email
Autoresponder On Each POP3
4 True Sub-domains
Free 128 Bit SSL Secure Server
Free Domain Name Transfer
24/7 FTP Access to Hosting Acct
Search Engine Submission
Graphical Web Site Statistics
Customised Error Pages
Password Protected Directories
Web Hosting Technical Support

They also forgot free webmail, but I don't think that's relevant to the empeg board.

Anyway, as I've said before, I've had nothing but great experiences with these guys, although I've only been with them for about a month. Worth every penny for me.

I will back up NAC as a high quality ISP. At least on the dial-up side of things.

I set up my grandmother with them (she now has cable modem) and I have a friend that abuses their unlimited dialup. By abuse, I mean he is connected 15 hours a day. If I'm not mistaken, NAC also hosts DSLReports.com which is a very high-traffic site.

Yeah, I'm not the best speller in the world!

But as for the price, I’m sure it can be negotiated. I thought I read somewhere that we would/should raise a thousand for hosting. I’m sure I can try and get something based on our Bronze hosting package, which is 19.95 per month, but only gives 5mb of transfer. Tony said we need about 5.5 gigs of transfer, plus whatever space for hosting the files and such. I’ll find out tomorrow what the lowest we can go for the bandwidth.

Yes, we do host DSLReports.com, my server sits next to them. ;-)

Anyway, like i said on my other post, i'll try and work out a fair price. I agree that $500 a year is a bit much, but this is just what my boss told me. I'm sure we can work something fair out, they have always been fair to me. But at least you don't have to worry about bandwidth!

and maybe if someone wants to donate a server, I’m sure i can dedicate this bbs on that server and co-locate the server.

Hi Everybody,
I currently own a web hosting company located in Upstate New York. We have dual 10megabit connections at our location. I can provide rack space for a dedicated server to host this awesome bbs site. Our location is secured, climate controlled, and fully managed. I think Tony said the site currently uses around 6gb/monthly bandwidth? Plus the emails the bbs sends out? If this is true, I can provide bandwidth free of charge. We can provide reboots of the server, if needed, but if anyone else could manage the server that would be a great help. Both my business partner and I own empegs, and read the bbs daily. We are currently using about 400k constant upstream, with peaks to around 600k, so bandwidth really isn’t an issue. Let me know if I can help in anyway, willing to do just about anything to keep this bbs up and running with out any downtime. Please contact me via email for the fastest replies. If I missed anything in this post, please let me know.

Thanks,
Oliver Hine
Intelliweb, Inc
[email protected]

Oliver,

I want to have your baby.

I like the sound of this offer best... no offense to all the ISPs that all your Grannies have been set up on, and all the rest...

(Oh, and if it's not redundant already, I'll chip in if necessary, too!)

hmmm... you don't say

I see I'm too late, but I just thought I'd recommend a host that I use.

$7.95 per month, free setup if you pay for a year in advance.

http://www.ipowerweb.com/products/index.html

200 megs of storage
20GB of bandwith!
PHP/SQL
POP3
blah blah

Best deal I've ever been able to find for a webhost.

Chris

In reply to:

---

Um, did you know that RackShack has gotten itself onto most of the anti-spam blocks? I'd doubt that 30% of the people who are on this BBS would be able to get e-mail from the BBS if it moves over to there.

---

That's certainly news to me. I can understand how this could happen to a popular server supplier if they're not careful since everyone who owns a server (of which there are a lot of people) can do whatever they want with their server (in that they have root access), but RackShack has a strict spam policy and I was under the impression that they enforced it well. I know that I haven't had any problems (I have a web site going on this server) and reading through the RackShack support forums, I haven't seen any other people having problems of this sort. Bear in mind that RackShack own hundreds if not thousands of IP blocks so I should imagine it would be hard to get them all black-listed anyway.

Not that I don't believe you, but do you have any proof of what you're saying? Some sort of article or something that suggests that RackShack isn't the way to go? It's just that I've heard nothing but good things and I did a lot of research for my friend when we were looking for a server provider.

I do nightly backups using mysqlhotcopy and it seems to
work okay for me.

There would also be a 2nd database for the riocar bbs.

It look like as well as 50UKP/Month my provider is also requiring me to change my server from a mini-tower to a 1U server - which is probably going to cost too much!

Thanks for everybody that has offered donations but I think we may
end up looking at moving the BBS to another host.

Well sorry i can't hep out here, no oily bits and too many spinny bits

In reply to:

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There would also be a 2nd database for the riocar bbs.

---

That would be okay. Although only one database is created by default, it's easy enough to add additional ones.

Hi Tony,

I think I can host it free of charge. I have two machines co-located that I run. One at Rackspace USA, the other here at Internet Solutions in South Africa. Both boxes are currently pushing over 200 gig per month, so I think squeezing another 5-10 gig shouldn't be a problem.

Both machines are running FreeBSD. Mail me directly please if interested.


Regards,
Aragon

Well, failing all that, I've got a Business class DSL connection to my home. I currently host a few low bandwidth sites on bovineamerica.com, and would be quite happy to host empeg.comms.net, a machine, or whatever is required. I just talked with my ISP, and they have no plans for adding a bandwidth cap or charging for high bandwidth usage, so no problems there.
I'd be happy to build a machine, host a machine, whatever it takes. I won't be moving for at least three years, so no fears of the hosting going away in that amount of time. The connection itself is 1.5mb from the internet, and 350k to the internet. Not sure if that is enough, but seems like it should be. Course it would be hosted in the states, not sure if that causes a problem.

Usenet newsgroups: news.admin.net-abuse.email. Just go to google and search that group for Rackspace.
They're slow to terminate spammers and/or their websites. Currently the more rabid anti-spam groups(The ones who will list all of the IP blocks from an ISP instead of just the IP addresses of the spammers) have listed most of Rackspace, and if you're there, and not being blocked, it's only a matter of time before it does happen

In reply to:

---

Usenet newsgroups: news.admin.net-abuse.email. Just go to google and search that group for Rackspace.
They're slow to terminate spammers and/or their websites. Currently the more rabid anti-spam groups(The ones who will list all of the IP blocks from an ISP instead of just the IP addresses of the spammers) have listed most of Rackspace, and if you're there, and not being blocked, it's only a matter of time before it does happen

---

I think you may have misread my original post: I'm talking about Rackshack not Rackspace. A search on that newsgroup gives 2390 hits for Rackspace but only 191 for Rackshack and, reading through, the Rackshack mentions seem a lot more positive.

Oops, my bad.

Sorry, a bit touchy, the company I work for (small web design/hosting) Had a a client who housed a box for DNS on our network, turned out to be a spammer(but not through our network), and we'd gotten listed before we could terminate their account...It took work to get them to unlist us so the mail could get through again.

i'm in pretty much the same situation. i have a 1.1MB SDSL connection to my home (which really means 800K) which costs me about $250/month. i'd be happy to stick another box in my living room or add this bbs to my current server (http://forums.joe.to)

I don't think we're going to be able to afford $500 a year!

Hmmm... let's see. That works out to be about 22 cents per year per registered bbs member. Yeah, that's pretty steep, all right.

Realistically speaking, if even one out of every 50 members chipped in, it would still cost them less than a dollar a month. Hey, even I can afford that much.

But you're right of course -- the logistics of assessing and collecting the money would be so problematical that the whole structure would collapse under its own weight, although I bet we could raise a couple thousand dollars to keep it going for at least four more years with a one-time "fund-raising drive" here on the bbs.

tanstaafl.

I still wish we could just use a mailing list, but for some reason everyone likes the slow web interface with forms and stuff. Ah well.

Not everyone has a nicely threaded mail reader. For that matter not all clients will bother putting the reference headers which make it all work in. See also bandwidth needed for that much mail assuming same traffic levels, and how large of a mailbox you need if you want to receive it all.

Just because you work for a university and get free bandwidth and a place to stuff your machines doesn't mean everybody does;)

In reply to:

---

... for some reason everyone likes the slow web interface ...

---

Not everyone - I for one miss scoring, sensible citation highlighting, biff, selective catchup and a decent editor with spellcheck, BBDB, etc. But this place survived at the expense of the mailing lists, so I just have to tolerate it, I suppose.

I suppose you're right, but I want to make sure that for $500, we're getting a good deal. It just didn't seem like that $500 thing was any better than a lot of other options that have been listed here.

It just didn't seem like that $500 thing was any better than a lot of other options that have been listed here.

True, but these offers shift around all the time. What might be a good deal today may not be next week (well, exaggeration, but the idea is there - somewhere).

I do not know what other responsibilities PaulH has to deal with and what time constraints he is under. As it is, I am very happy for the time and effort he (and everyone else) have given to this board. The critical thing is that PaulH can migrate the BBS and all that goes with it to a new home or upgrade and pay in place before his current service is shut down; with enough lead time to get it done and still have a life of his own.

A number of very good suggestions and offers of support (funding and hosting) have been made. I am no expert at comparing the various offers, but I am certain that whichever will be the final outcome, I will be glad that the board is still around. Wherever it will wind up.

I don't think it will be necessary to resort to spending any money. There are perfectly good free of charge offers on the table (including the empeg.com host if necessary).

Rob

Just an FYI, looks like if the move does become necessary, it will be over to RioCar.Org. I already have it set up, and am just finishing up a few things. Once the official switch occurs, it should be transparent to most, as the domain will still stay the same (empeg.comms.net). Rob R., I'll work with you on getting empegbbs.com moved over as well.

Again, nothing is completly confirmed right now, but it seems this is the way it will be.

And for those who didn't catch it, I popped Drakino up to Admin status to help facilitate a smooth transition. Note his name appears in red now. Yeah yeah, ph3ar the dragon. Whatever.

Hosting it on the same server as Empeg.Com was another option that was high on the list as well. The choice to go with the Riocar.Org server instead was made because it had more available bandwidth, I believe.

Yeah, Tom!

www.hetzner.de is quite cheap...

Yeah, but nothing beats "free".

Many thanks to Tom ("Drakino") for taking over the BBS hosting chores. It's now being hosted from the same server as www.riocar.org , so all is well.