Ok thats a good point but i dont think you guys are doing all you can to cut back on bandwidth and costs. The images example given by seven i think is a good one. You can save prolly 1-2gb by shrinking the size of images you use. Lets face it though, this is an internet wide dilemma really. There is still no good model to either make money or break even with a website. At one time you could during the internet bubble but now that ads are not paying all that much its harder and harder for any site to meet bandwidth limits. Until something else comes along besides popups that advertisers think is worth spend more money on i dont think this problem will get any better. Why? becuase we HATE these ads and have ways to not have to see them and so we will not see them because we choose not to. I think what will eventually happen is that more and more sites will go the way of IGN (for lack of a better example) and start charging a monthly fee to view certain content. In your case this isnt really feasible because you are adamant about keeping the BOG free of charge, and i really think that is great. Its a wonderful service and is really beneficial to any all computer users.
Hello UnLoadeD, Thanks for your very kind words. I'm not sure how many would pay for subscription... I guess I'm trying to ensure that the online site stays free while people who would like to support my work can buy the printed version or the e-book version. There will be extras in those two versions... but the basics will always be here at Adrian's Rojak Pot. The original contract actually included the online version of the BOG so if I was greedy, I could have given it all to them because it would also earn me money. But again, I feel that I could always maintain a free source of BIOS information for everyone. I'm NOT even asking to be paid for this. I just want everyone to help me maintain this site. Without support from our visitors, there's no way we can survive, much less expand! Hello WKHarmon, I'm looking at the list of The Planet's Virtual Hosting plans... Looks like they are offering 125MB of storage space and 5GB of bandwidth for $199.95 per month! That's very expensive. Their dedicated servers seem to only have 200GB of bandwidth for $299 and above...
Well, se7en did point out that the image can be compressed further, but we know that the images will only take like 5GB at most, it's a lot, but from 100GB, it's only 5%, which is almost negligible, which is why Adrian wants to maintain the image quality. Even if we don't include any images, it will not solve the bandwidth problem we are facing now, because majority of the bandwidth is taken from viewing BOG.
Hello Rigger, We also hate pop-ups... That's why we only allow a single pop-up and that's only once per visitor per session (24 hours, I think). If you are getting more than this on our site, please do let me know. I'll bring it up with the agency. The trouble with asking for subscription fees is that it will need us to do quite a bit of work protecting the PDF or HTML files and yet, people will still get around it. That's why we hope that people will CHOOSE to support free content. The publisher I have in mind seems rather confident that the book will sell. Even his technical advisor seems to be of the same mind. Hopefully it will end up that way. If we ever get the book to print, I'll be working with them to ensure some kind of upgrade system which will allow readers to constantly update themselves with the latest BIOS options. Hello Josh, There's nothing wrong with supported hosting... IF one can find a host to do that.
Adrian: Rackshack is Linux only, but 400gb a month and your OWN box for $99 a month.. I think it would be worth reprogramming or finding new software for.. Certainly a better alternative than closing the site down. If you need, I can help you out on the software thing... My site is beta testing a new Content Management System based on PHP/MySQL... ICQ me if you want - 1055836
Hello lowlight, Thanks for the offer! Actually, we are now looking at The Planet's SuperServer Special offer which is very good too. For $149, we can have our own box with 500GB of bandwidth. And it will come with Win2K Server! But we will have to do some serious calculations and make sure there are no potholes before we proceed. BTW, WKHarmon, my apologies to you. I've found the offer from The Planet that you were talking about.
Some ideas for you... Adrian, You have a wonderful publication and shouldn't let this issue get it your way. There's always a better option than shutting down, it's just a matter of finding it. Here are some of my ideas.... You have a loyal fan base, take advantage of it. You should really find a way to collect donations. A lot of your readers are probably high school and college kids that don't want to be spending money on a subscription to your site, so charging everybody will just send them to [H], AT, or wherever else they find there hardware info. However, you surely have a lot of readers who are off on their own and making enough money to send over a hefty donation. I don't know if you're familiar with DI.fm (Digitally Imported Radio), but they have made a killing in donations. They amassed something like $15,000 in donations for hosting fees and servers in a matter of weeks. While you may not be able to rake in $15K, you'll get more than you're getting in donations now: $0. DI used PayPal for donations.... I'm sorry to hear they are unavailable to you... I know that most forum goers who buy/sell hardware amongst eachother use paypal. Perhaps you've got a friend in the States that can set up and maintain an account for you? Bottom line... dont just dismiss the idea of donations, it could really prove to be a lifesaver for you. As for ads being blocked by your readers, you'll definitely want to do something about this. If you allow readers limited access with ad-blocking enabled, then they'll have enough time to get hooked on your material, motivating them to stick around but turn ad-blocking off. For example, you could allow a user to read the first 3 pages of a 6 page review, but then when they hit page 4 display a nice message that breifly explains why you need ads to stay afloat, then nicely ask them to turn ad-blocking off I think that you'll find significant revenue in a partnership with DealTime. I know they pay great comissions, and you can integrated their program into your reviews so that you can give you readers a way to buy the hardware they are reading about. If you would like the e-mail address from somebody at DealTime that could help you with this, e-mail me at [email protected]. BizRate.com is another way of doing this. I don't know what your personal finances are like, but if you've ever been in a situation where you're having trouble paying all the bills in one month, you probably know how important pinching pennies can be. Look to the little things: Decreasing file sizes by using lower-qual photos will save you a little bit of bandwidth. Maybe its not a whole lot, but its still a little more bandwidth than you would have had otherwise. Consider selling some of the hardware you've reviewed once you are done with it and no longer need it for comparitive purposes. That's how I pay for my hosting fees. ------------------- Now, the big thing you'll want to consider is how you'll be paying for Adrian's Rojak Pot 3 years from now. The sad truth about web advertising is that it does not work. That's why the internet bubble is no more. Advertisments on websites simply do not turn enough profit for advertisers, so there's always going to be a limit to how much you can make through advertisements. I'm assuming you have a full-time job in addition to your work with Adrian's Rojak Pot.... If this is the case you must realize that your work could be done better, or you would at least be able to do more work, if you did not need your other full-time job. So, now we've got a goal: take Adrian's Rojak Pot to a point where it is completely self-sufficient, and is making enough money to support me and my family as well. We've established that ads don't make enough money, and that you want to make a lot of money, if possible, so you need to turn one of two ways: making money off of your readers, or making money off of other companies that have a lot of money already. I do some development work for a site geared towards student-athletes that charges division 1 NCAA colleges massive amounts of money for the opportunity to come into a chat room and talk with interested high school athletes. These colleges have money to spend, the service is valuable, so they spend it. This business model wont work for computer hardware; you'll need to come up with one like it. Be creative. If you have enough wit about you to be able to manage an effective computer hardware review site you can certainly come up with a profitable business plan that is a win-win for everybody. Remember, its not about finding one possible solution to your problem, its about exploring every single possiblity, then inventing your own new possiblilities as well, then choosing what fits you best. I know all you want to do is write about hardware, but you'll have to dig out the entreprenuer inside of you eventually if you want Adrian's Rojak Pot to be online still in 2008. Hope i did a little more than just ramble on uselessly and eat up more of your bandwidth
Hmm well this is my first posting here, anyhew I'm just dumping in my 2 cents. First up there is only one site I use adblockers on, that is because the zillion or so Flash pop-up ads on that site are so dern annoying it makes the site unbearable. Second up I don't use adblockers anywhere else because I know what this does to webmasters, I personally find no problem with ad banners, pop-ups do get annoying but only when there are 2 or more on any one page. So to get to the point, if you wish to keep sites like this open please quit using those ad blockers, I don't care to see this site or others close so I will tolerate the ad banners and occasional pop-up thats not too much inconvenience now is it?
have you thought about a completely text BOG? one without all the surrounding pictures logos etc, just the BOG and some ads? how much would it cost to set your own server up? i know of some sites that do that, does it work out more cost effective or is it just because they can? Josh
also - are you sure your figures are correct? could it be that people are closing the pop-up as soon as it appears, and before it loads the image for the advert? (because i know that's often what i automatically do with pop-ups, i close them even before they have a chance to load!)
Okay, as has been stated already. Part of the bandwidth issue can, and would be alleviated by more judicious use of images. Not necessarily smaller images. But images that use better compression or a different format. As was pointed out, for many iconic/non-photographic images below 100x100 pixels, GIF is a MUCH better format. And, for larger, photographic images, a higher compression setting JPEG is more ideal. Note: Just a quickie breakdown of your front page. 60K of HTML/ASP 110K of images (JPEG and GIF) Simply by being a bit more aggressive about image management, you can cut your total bandwidth for this page by 1/3. if not more. As to your contention that you want to give nice, big images for people. That's great. I like the sentiment, but you also have to use some common sense here. Now the following statement is just my opinion so take it as you will. I view your site at 1600x1200 and 1920x1440 most of the time. And the images are still quite big. By dropping to 1024x768, they become HUGE. What you may want to think about doing is implementing a thumbnailing system for some of them. Display a smaller, but still-readable image, and link it to the larger original if they need that much more detail. Additionally, you REALLY want to have some sort of in-depth log analysis in place. Something that'll break your traffic down by: Individual Page Views File Types File Sizes Individual non-page files This way you can mine your traffic data to see what's really pulling down 100GB of bandwidth. Note: One of the sites on my server was pulling 7GB/day (210GB/month). Unfortunately for them, they didn't have your option of site optimization. 99% of the traffic is due to their message board system. Even still, we were able to reduce their bandwidth consumption by a significant amount (about 10%), simply by doing image optimization. Also, HTML compression is nice. But usually, the HTML compression alone results in only a minor bandwidth savings. What you may want to look for is a more complete HTTP 1.1 ZIP compression. So literally everything you send out is compressed, so long as the browser allows for it (IE does, Mozilla does, Opera does). With proper caching, this would yield major bandwidth savings over and above straight-text HTML compression and, after the initial compression, would result in zero server lag. As to end-user lag for the browser decompression, depending on the end-user's system, lag would be 2-3 seconds between transfer-end and page display for most modern systems. For users whose systems are overloaded by their software already (someone on a P2 233 with 32MB of RAM trying to run Win2K), you could double that time. However, the additional time spent decompressing the data, in most cases, is already outweighed by the time they've saved downloading a 100K of compressed files in lieu of 200K of uncompressed files.
Advert blocking I block adverts because I dont like being tracked. I also use a 56k modem for browsing and all those animated GIFs are both huge and a pain in the ass when they flash like mad. Dont even talk about flash banners. Ive had to remove shockwave/flash and disable the GUID in the registry to remove them. Ive also had to block many of the banner servers as they stream the javascript for onMouseOver, onMouseUNder, onMouseTwitch etc... These popunders/ups are the most annoying thing and I do go out of my way to remove them. Adverts are intrusive now. No one likes door to door salesmen or the w**kers ringing at 7pm asking you about your long distance provider nor do that like flashing annoying adverts that are 200k big and load 30 times slower then the page theyre on. Pay for HTTP compression? Hell, HTTPZIP is $249 or so. Move the host to Linux, its got free gzip. I think even phpbb has internal GZIP compression as well. Youll be able to really reduce the bandwith as soon as something puts JPEG2000 support into a browser.. You could move all the images to a bulk provider that is cheaper, hosted on Linux, drop the JPG quality right down, disable image linking. I would donate money to sites but I dont trust Paypal and their nazi tactics with other peoples money and credit card details. They freeze money without so much as a 2nd thought, something that would require a court order for a normal bank to do.
I have an idea but first I'll explain who I am and how I found your site. I was on HardOCP and found a link to this topic and since I am going through the exact same kinda thing in regard to bandwidth on my site I thought I'd try and give u some advice. I run a site called Strathycruise (www.strathycruise.com) based in Scotland and its all to do with cars and cruising. We've been running for 3 years and have a good following. We received our web hosting renewal notice in last week and found we are using around 80gb of bandwidth per month. Being in the UK things are more expensive and the cost to us was going to be £2 per gig = £160 per month or £1920 per year. Something we couldnt not afford to pay in one go. Instead of staying with our current host we were advised by them to seek an alternative host that could offer us a better rate. After a weekend of frantic searching I found a company called Cheetaweb.com who offered me a really good deal of 1gb of space and 80gb a month for £35 per month, a huge saving over what I was being charged in the UK. Now onto some ways that might be able to help you reduce your bandwidth. If you've logged onto my site by now you will see we have thousands of photos from car events all over the site. Initially I didnt really care about the filesizes so just uploaded the images and left it at that. What Ive now found is that inside JPEG files there is extra data that is unneeded on the web called EXIF data. This can hold details such as camera information, flash settings and also a small embedded JPG thumbnail inside the main JPG file. By stripping this EXIF data off can chop the filesize of each image down by a factor of 10k with no loss of quality ! We were finding that the thumbnails were usually 15k each for small 150x115 sized thumbs, removing the EXIF data reduced this to 5k each. It loaded quicker and used less bandwidth. Programs to look at would be Exifer and MetaStripper. Both freeware and very useful. Since you are concious of the quality of the images I can suggest a program called Neat Image. It will look at JPG files and remove artifacts, moire patterns and interference without loosing visual quality. Check the web site www.neatimage.com for details and examples. My final thought would be about using GZIP compression on your site and indeed forum. PhpBB 2.0.4 has the option internally to compress the pages and that in itself can reduce your bandwidth by a huge factor. You can also install and run an Apache module called mod_gzip. You can read about this amazing space saver on Sitepoint : (http://www.sitepoint.com/article/1029). I hope that some of this information will be of use to you, I know what heartahe Ive gone through this last week trying to sort my site out and keep its head above water. Being more of a local based site I have managed to arrange banner adverts with local car companies which pay on a monthly basis to keep the site costs covered and also to pay for wear and tear or my photographic equipment. I hope you guys get things sorted as I would hate for a valuable resource which is loved by many to close its doors, I know I would hate to have to close my own. Kind regards, Rikki
Re: Ad blocking I use ad-blocking (Proxomitron) but I have found the BOG useful. How about a compromise? Anti-ad-blocking for just the BOG? Have a cover page explaining the reasons and exactly how many ads will be displayed. I would bypass my ad-blocker under those circumstances and I think most people would.
So will it help if i hit "refresh" a few hundred times on the main page, while not using any form of ad-blocker? I'm not doing anything else right now
BOG I would be more than happy to pay for BOG. Say, $20 a year would be worth every penny. Would also donate if you wish to keep BOG non-paying. Keep up the great work.
No matter the outcome, you guys have my respect... For bringing this problem to the readers...and lettting us in on the problem. I also appreciate that you are attempting to answer the posts... As I stated previously...hopefully, now that you have brought this to everyone's attention...the majority can just let the banners go! But you know, no matter what...there will always be one (insert descriptive noun here) who will keep the blocker on!!! Hate to say it...but, you know...there is always someone who needs that extra attention. Well, hope it works out. I will be here, without any software... Thanks, Kelin
Hey guys, I was pointed here comliments of Reyawn at Bjorn3D. In regards to the pop-ups and baners.... I have no probs w/ banners what so ever, I don't think u guys have to many 4 is fine, even 6 would work. On the other hand I HATE pop-ups and don't use ad blockers, y would I when windows has what u need built right in, I just get scripts to prompt b4 they run and a quick hit of the "enter" key quickly dismisses them. To me pop-ups r definately very annoying bringing up windows and confusing ur searching & surfing. I have no probs w/ actual ads on a page and depending on the site I may make a few rulz for it so that the scripts can run. I would have to agree about the optimization of pics put up on the site, alot of web sites don't pay attention and just post pics as they r. If they r taken into a good image editing prog like photoshop and saved using jpeg compression and taking note not to save them at max but at instead medium or below. U will hardly notice the quality diff on the web but u will notice the file size, I have DL'd images from case galleries and when I open them in Photoshop the have been saved at the highest quality jpeg and when I re-save them they end up being about 1/5 the size. Good luck w/ keeping the site open. I would have to say 100GB of bandwidth seems alot to b using tho
I dont normally post here, just use the bios guide. Ads here are blocked for me, after installing tweak-xp. This program and many others like it afaik block ads from certain domains only. This is why i still see almost all adverts on for example tomshardware, and more than half on anandtech. If you make the ads with flash its even hard enough to find the source to block it (most people can figure out the right-click> properties). If you can use another method to display the adverts many more people will be seeing them, in the least because it takes effort to deliberately block them this way and aslong as yours arent too large and/or intrusive, people will not bother. I use an adblocker and tbh asking people to just stop using them is pointless, its not going to happen for the vast majority of people. My blocker more cuts webpage loading time for me (on my 64k connecton )in half, and reduces the number of popups, which tbh are the spawn of satan and a source of utter disgust - especially those ones that dont have a [x] to close, Ive decided to never buy products from a few companies because of these stupid advertisements. If people dont want to see the advertisements, theyre not suddenly going to decide to buy the damn product. If you want people to stop using adblockers, they need to stop annoying people so much that they find themselves going to the trouble of finding a program to stop adverts. If you change the method of displaying them, at least people would need to block them specifically for this site, effort few will bother with unless they are excessive.
http://www.strathycruise.com/cruise/03-02-23/cruise-24.jpg - 57k Thats a 640x480 image saved at level 6/7 in Photoshop 7. The reason the filesize is still under 60k and the quality is high is because I have used the blur tool to soften the parts of the image that are not relevant. Not only does this focus the visitors attention on the part of the image you want them to be looking at, it helps the JPEG compression algorithms reduce the filesize a lot as well. This process takes but seconds in PS to do (just a quick swipe with the Blur tool around the outside of the image) and reduces a further amount of kilobytes from the total image size. Coupled with removing the EXIF data and built in thumbnail information saves a hell of a lot of space. I'm now much more concious about this kind of thing when editing images. - R.
