Team OcUK

Man of Honour
Joined
4 Nov 2002
Posts
15,549
Location
West Berkshire
Folks,

Just a bit of advance warning that there is some risk I'll have to pull the plug on Team OcUK in a few months.

I can't go into too many details but suffice to say that I may need to put my finances on a strict diet and at £125/month, Team OcUK is likely to be an early candidate.

I will however investigate the possibility of running it from home. It'd be much slower and less reliable, but also much cheaper.

If anyone has any money-saving ideas, I'd welcome them. Please also rest assured that when I know what's going to happen, you will.
 
Last edited:
£125 a month is a significant outlay for a 'hobby'
I'm sure some of the guys here may be able to help as it a great resource, slow would be a massive improvement than gone.
but as ever real life comes first - hope the budget squeeze is not job related
 
Last edited:
Biggest (and only) cost is the hosting. Due to size it needs a dedicated server.

How much space does it need ? How many files ?

My web hosting account disk quota is 20,000 Mb, and 262,144 files.

AND unlimited monthly traffic.:D

It's sitting there virtually empty and idle.

Would that be of any use ?
 
The server has two 250GB disks...

Code:
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3              19G   11G  7.4G  58% /
udev                   10M  148K  9.9M   2% /dev
/dev/sda4             212G  190G   21G  91% /mnt/data
/dev/sdb2             230G  170G   58G  75% /backups
shm                   2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/loop0            496M   17M  455M   4% /tmp
/dev/sda1              99M  8.7M   86M  10% /boot
 
The server has two 250GB disks...

Code:
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3              19G   11G  7.4G  58% /
udev                   10M  148K  9.9M   2% /dev
/dev/sda4             212G  190G   21G  91% /mnt/data
/dev/sdb2             230G  170G   58G  75% /backups
shm                   2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /dev/shm
/dev/loop0            496M   17M  455M   4% /tmp
/dev/sda1              99M  8.7M   86M  10% /boot

Wow!! :eek:

I guess it's gonna need a bit more than I've got. (And I thought I had a lot! :()

Hope somebody else can come to the rescue, it'd be a real shame to lose it!
.
 
I can't imagine hosting it from home is going to be *that* much slower. It doesn't get that much traffic, does it?

What takes up all the space on it? I thought it just parsed a file and did some maths?

I'd be willing to help out with hosting if needed on my home server (1Mb up, on 24/7).
 
Nope, traffic isn't a huge problem overall, but uptime is. I use my connection for a fair amount of other stuff and that might cause problems.

I'll know for sure in a month, but right now it's looking likely I'll have to reel in the finances. I'll definitely have to procure a couple big disks for my home server while I can as the ones currently are in their death throes.

I've already set crunchers to empty caches. Got enough work to get me to 1m cobblies (SETI), and we'll take it from there. Every little helps.

PS - Sorry this thread seems rather vague/panicky. There are sound arguments behind this but I can't post all the details.
 
Last edited:
Team OcUK may be a bit slow for the next few hours. I'm backing up the databases and compressing lots of files to free up disk space.
 
I'll know in three weeks. If the worst does happen I'll fund it until the end of January.

In any event I'm going to look at bringing the data back home. It's currently running at a rate of 3p/visit which is actually quite a lot. I can avoid some of the performance impact by getting a little VPS, which will give me what I want for my own use and enough headroom to run the front end of Team OcUK.

I may also stick a PayPal Donate link up on the site to help offset costs (I would never take a profit from it, because that would break forum rules).
 
Last edited:
No - didn't know about that, but too much disk space anyway. That might, however, be something close to what I get as a VDS/VPS replacement.

It's currently hosted by one of the owners of Tsohost though. :)

Edit - actually, disk space isn't the problem, but memory might be (the update code bursts to 2GB+ during updates).
 
Last edited:
I thought you were using UK Webhosting :). I guess you are right that the disk isn't the issue but the memory may be. Technically couldn't you become a big reseller and have two of the Clustered reseller packages? :D. Bit cheeky.

Either way it'd be worth speaking with TSOHost and see what they could come up with.
 
If I can bring the DB server home, I have hardware beefy enough to cope already. I'd then need quite a small hosting package (one of those TSOhost packages would easily do it, though I think I'd prefer a VDS as I've been used to full access and would quite like to keep it).

This will cause a drop in stability (maybe 1% instead of the current 0.01%), but I don't think that's a huge deal. All graphical objects get cached anyway so, for example, if someone posts an image here it won't impact my network connection.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top Bottom