1/4 of overclockers visitors visit forums

tres · 9 Apr 2008 at 13:34

Telescopi said:
It does, I've seen the bill Hardware rental, bandwidth, and completely managed - it's not the cheapest but it works.

I'd imagine as a marketting asset an advertising type person would value it at more than that though - in reality who knows, I'd guess it brings in business but I know no more than any of you

so you colo your own hardware, completly managed and it costs 25 grand a year

stop having us on and making yourselves look hard done by

ironman · 9 Apr 2008 at 13:40

Telescopi said:
It does, I've seen the bill Hardware rental, bandwidth, and completely managed - it's not the cheapest but it works.

I'd imagine as a marketting asset an advertising type person would value it at more than that though - in reality who knows, I'd guess it brings in business but I know no more than any of you

Tell you what, I'll handle that and manage everything and i'll only charge £15k a year.....

tres · 9 Apr 2008 at 13:42

Good man gurdas, saving OC money, i'm sure they can then pass that on to us consumers in the form of (EVEN) lower prices.

Raymond Lin · 9 Apr 2008 at 13:43

semi-pro waster said:
I could be wrong on this but from various threads I think that the server(s?) these forums run on belong to OcUK and to get a UK based host plus guaranteed uptime with callout etc won't be quite so cheap.

I don't know whether it does or doesn't cost £25k p/a but I'm not sure I see the point in lying about it. If it costs £10 and a Mars bar then why not say so?

It could cost 50k and it'll still be a bargain.

Consider the hardware troubleshooting alone offer by its members, to get that run by someone who works in OCUK, to hire them 24/7 at 365, it'll mean 3 people at about 8 hours shift each, even at 20k a year salary you are saving £10k with the forum, that is before you think about the money saved on advertising, and then the extra sales the forum brings in through the recommendation of its members.

G|mp · 9 Apr 2008 at 13:44

icey_haj said:
bit harsh on the purple shirts though, dont you think?

Nope

cheets64 · 9 Apr 2008 at 13:48

Angilion said:
Brilliant typo! "being" instead of "buying" makes the post much funnier.

"I want to be a tree."

"Yeah, well, I'm a Core 2 Q6600."

hehe, oops had "being" on the mind.

Angilion · 9 Apr 2008 at 14:00

Raymond Lin said:
It could cost 50k and it'll still be a bargain.

Consider the hardware troubleshooting alone offer by its members, to get that run by someone who works in OCUK, to hire them 24/7 at 365, it'll mean 3 people at about 8 hours shift each, even at 20k a year salary you are saving £10k with the forum, that is before you think about the money saved on advertising, and then the extra sales the forum brings in through the recommendation of its members.

You'd need a minimum of 5 people to do that. 168 hours a week (24x7) would mean four people working 42 hours a week each, and that assumes only one person on at each time. Which wouldn't work as well as the forums, anyway. You'd phone up and probably wait at least 15 minutes for a reply. maybe much longer. It also assumes that these people work 8.5 hours shifts without any breaks at all, which wouldn't work (and would be illegal) and never have any time off at all, ever, for any reason, which also wouldn't work and would be illegal. So you'd need at least 5 people to provide even minimal
coverage 24/7/365, and that would still be an inferior service to that which the forums provide solely in terms of troubleshooting, which is just one of the things these forums do that is useful to OcUK.

Raymond Lin · 9 Apr 2008 at 14:02

Angilion said:
You'd need a minimum of 5 people to do that. 168 hours a week (24x7) would mean four people working 42 hours a week each, and that assumes only one person on at each time. Which wouldn't work as well as the forums, anyway. You'd phone up and probably wait at least 15 minutes for a reply. maybe much longer. It also assumes that these people work 8.5 hours shifts without any breaks at all, which wouldn't work (and would be illegal) and never have any time off at all, ever, for any reason, which also wouldn't work and would be illegal. So you'd need at least 5 people to provide even minimal
coverage 24/7/365, and that would still be an inferior service to that which the forums provide solely in terms of troubleshooting, which is just one of the things these forums do that is useful to OcUK.

I was merely making a point, otherwise i would go into holidays taken, lunch breaks, sick days cover.......................

GhostlyPea · 9 Apr 2008 at 14:03

Without the forums I honestly don't think OCUK would do as well as it has.

- Pea0n

Werewolf · 9 Apr 2008 at 14:41

*wonders where he can get a server with full managed service with (very) fast support response times at any time of the day or night, 365¼ days per year for £100 a month*

I've not seen the bills myself but I do know from past experience the support package Spie has is very good, I would like to see a similar level of support from a pile em high, sell em cheap service where they are looking after a couple of hundred servers (with multiple virtual servers on most of them) with one tech

24/7 full service with a guaranteed service/response time isn't cheap, indeed I would suspect that many of the "unlimited" cheap packages are the equivalent of Sky Unlimited ADSL compared to a dedicated business line

You can certainly cut costs a lot if you host it yourself and do all the support "in house", but then you have a lot of extra bother and downtime when something goes wrong

tres · 9 Apr 2008 at 14:44

We're not saying £100 a month
We're saying not £2,000 a month

Burnsy2023 · 9 Apr 2008 at 15:35

Werewolf said:
snip

Is the shop hosted under a similar package/server etc?

I would have thought being a critical business resource, hosting isn't something you'd want to skimp on.

Burnsy

Dave M · 9 Apr 2008 at 15:38

trescodrucey said:
so you colo your own hardware, completly managed and it costs 25 grand a year

stop having us on and making yourselves look hard done by

Nope, I did say rented didn't I?

Dave M · 9 Apr 2008 at 15:42

trescodrucey said:
We're not saying £100 a month
We're saying not £2,000 a month

It doesn't really matter what your saying - you're not hosting it. If the people hosting it were saying 100 a pound I'm sure Spie would happily accept their offer, but they aren't

And before anyone makes a gracious offer to host for 20p - unless your a large multinational or somebody we have used for years don't bother, trust has to come from somewhere.

tres · 9 Apr 2008 at 15:42

2x Xeon 5310
(2x Quad-Core = 8 CPUs)
4GB RAM
2 x 250GB RAID Protected Disks
1,000GB Premium Bandwidth
Daily offsite backups
Fully managed
24/7 support

and that's only £3,000 a year

tres · 9 Apr 2008 at 15:43

Telescopi said:
It doesn't really matter what your saying - you're not hosting it.

You're a good man no doubt, give me half and i'll host it for you.

Glaucus · 9 Apr 2008 at 15:48

Raymond Lin said:
But how is that worked out?

Since how can he track if every members on here has bought a product in the shop?

Ip address?

tres · 9 Apr 2008 at 15:53

No, i think he was implying that it's a net loss because it itself doesn't bring in any income, not that the business it generates was less than the cost to run it.

Raymond Lin · 9 Apr 2008 at 15:54

trescodrucey said:
No, i think he was implying that it's a net loss because it itself doesn't bring in any income, not that the business it generates was less than the cost to run it.

Hell, nor does the toilet, but sure it's useful to have it !

Berserker · 9 Apr 2008 at 16:08

trescodrucey said:
2x Xeon 5310
(2x Quad-Core = 8 CPUs)
4GB RAM
2 x 250GB RAID Protected Disks
1,000GB Premium Bandwidth
Daily offsite backups
Fully managed
24/7 support

and that's only £3,000 a year

What does '24/7 support' mean though - a lone tech or three providing little more than onsite hands and eyes, or proper 'if the **** hits the fan, we'll sort it' support? Uptime? SLA? If something breaks at 3AM how long are they going to take to fix it?

'Proper' hosting isn't just one box either. For starters, what about a firewall? Yeah, you can run a firewall on the same box, but then you have a single point of failure.

Good quality business-class hosting doesn't come cheap. I can think of an awful lot of companies that spend considerably more than £25k p.a. on their systems.