10 GB attachment folder cap removed and hosting update

[DJ_Omnimaga]

As you remember, I recently talked about the possibility that TIMGUL and Omnimaga websites move to a different hosting provider. Finally, I have learned some things about hosting providers that made me change my plans a little bit. Let me explain:

Those companies like 1and1 (the hosting provider TIMGUL used since its opening), Hostgator, Yahoo, Surpasshosting and Dreamhost that offers extremly high storage capacity and bandwidth (sometimes, even unlimited everything) for like $4-5 a month are known to the hosting world as "oversellers". 1and1 gave us 120 GB of diskspace and 1200 GB of bandwidth for $4.95 a month with two free domain names. However, there is a catch: they do not really give us this much bandwidth. Those hosting providers promise their customers with almost unlimited features to lure them, but if all those customers were to use this much space at once, they would go bankrupt. They simply lure customers this way because they know they are low budget people who will not even need this much diskspace. As a result, they host about 1000 websites per server. If many of those sites get busy at once, the server cannot handle the load and throw us a nice 500 Internal Server Error, forcing us to wait a few seconds and try again. Now what if one site in particular used way too much ressources compared to the others? Well... those hosts usually have one-sided contracts allowing them to disable parts of your site that take too much load or even terminate your account! I did not know that when I bought this hosting plan, but even if I knew, I did not expect TIMGUL and Omnimaga to ever get busy to that point. However, Omnimaga eventually went close and I was suggested to look for a more high-end hosting provider if I was planning to use more ressources in the future. However, a high-end hosting plan that would offer enough bandwidth and diskspace for TIMGUL would cost too much money and in our case it would be a dedicated server or a high-end VPS, which requires very good computer knowledge, something I am still not very good at.

So here is what happened:

-Omnimaga has been moved alone to a high-end shared hosting plan, which provides enough bandwidth per month for the website alone in long terms. It also provides more than enough diskspace for it (the site is 2.75 GB large).
-Initially, my plan was to merge TIMGUL with Omnimaga, integrating all TIMGUL posts, song, attachments and members in the other forum, but TIMGUL is simply too large (about 10 GB in size) to survive on the new host in long term. Also, Omnimaga, due to its nature, cannot be upgraded to SMF 2.0 in short terms. However, TIMGUL doesn't generate as much traffic as Omnimaga, even with music downloads, so as a result, it will remain on 1and1 with no danger of getting shut down due to server load abuse.

So basically, both sites are now hosted on separate providers, each of them suiting both site needs accordingly (1and1 is better for diskspace, but not for bandwidth usage). With TIMGUL alone on a large capacity host, this allowed me to remove the 10 GB attachment cap on music attachments, so when the attachment folder will hit 10 GB, you will not get an error and will not need to delete old files. Hopefully, the migration of the other site elsewhere might improve TIMGUL performance as well.

[Fear 2 Stop®]

Cool news!

[Koolassjoe]

Y dont you do guys add a donations box? Maybe a simple yearly goal. This way whatever renovations needed can be implemented w/o the use of overhead. Or maybe just for upgrades? I imagine this place to evolve so a "Ideas" Heading in the boards could be used to vote on TIMGUL options and the donations would be used to fund any implementations. Any vote for a suggestions box?

[Master Dutch]

Omni you are like the Wizard from the Wizard of Oz...lol...The man behind the curtain. Thanks for setting us up man...