# Need help with the site



## GuitarsCanada (Dec 30, 2005)

We have been going way over our bandwidth with our current provider. They are a small outfit that have done a lot for me getting the site up an running. Been taking care of me for years but they are not really a major hosting site. They dont have the clout to offer up big bandwidth at low prices. Does anyone here know of any Canadian hosting sites that offer a good monthly plan? Suggestions are welcome. I need to do some shopping.


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## violation (Aug 20, 2006)

I use 1&1... pretty sure they're not Canadian though. I wasn't too concerned LOL their prices are decent, same for support.

Right now they have a 50% off sale for the first 3 months. $10/month for 5 domains / 300 GB space / 3TB monthly bandwidth, $20/month after the first 3. I think it's 50 cents per GB if you go over.


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## Hamm Guitars (Jan 12, 2007)

Check this out:

http://www.layeredtech.com/dedicated-servers/specials.php

They are in Texas, but when I was looking for a data center in Canada a few years back, I couldn't even get a colocation deal anywhere close to this. 1500GB transfer and it includes the server, the $59 Sempron 2600 with 512MB of RAM is likely all you need if you are just going to run a few web sites and a mail server.

If the self managed aspect scares you I would be willing to set it up for you and keep it running.


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## torndownunit (May 14, 2006)

I use Cartika and have been extremely happy with them. I use them for clients' sites as well.

http://www.cartikahosting.com/


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## Hamm Guitars (Jan 12, 2007)

Did you find what you were looking for? If not, how much bandwidth do you currently use?


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## dwagar (Mar 6, 2006)

I use Patrick from New Brunswick

www.pjmco.ca

His co is Canadian, but I'm pretty sure the servers he uses are Rackspace (out of Texas I believe), so there are never any issues.

I'm not sure what we allow for picture file sizes on here, but you might look at cutting them down a tad.


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## GuitarsCanada (Dec 30, 2005)

Hamm Guitars said:


> Did you find what you were looking for? If not, how much bandwidth do you currently use?


I need to do some scouting around. We are currently pulling about 25-30 GB per month. It's only going to get bigger as time goes on.


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## GuitarsCanada (Dec 30, 2005)

dwagar said:


> I use Patrick from New Brunswick
> 
> www.pjmco.ca
> 
> ...


The pictures are a big part of the usage. I will have to look at that.


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## Jeff Flowerday (Jan 23, 2006)

Actually pictures don't play a part in the band width. Pictures are only links to the hosting site. Our browsers download them from the host site not guitarscanada.


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## dwagar (Mar 6, 2006)

hmm, you sure about that?

if I embed a picture here, doesn't it download from here?

I understand the picture is physically stored somewhere else, but doesn't it push through GC's bandwidth?


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## Jeff Flowerday (Jan 23, 2006)

dwagar said:


> hmm, you sure about that?
> 
> if I embed a picture here, doesn't it download from here?


There is no way to embed a picture, attachments have been disabled. You can link a picture but that leaves the picture on the site that hosts it as I said.

Try this: Right click one of the embedded pictures, click on properties. What's the address of the picture? That address is where our browsers download(ed) it from. If vBulletin downloaded it and then restreamed it to us, it would take forever, if vBulletin stored the image as well it would take a huge amount of database space to store them all.

:food-smiley-004:


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## dwagar (Mar 6, 2006)

okay, I understand now. That makes sense.

So probably nothing to do but buy more bandwidth huh?


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## GuitarsCanada (Dec 30, 2005)

Actually according to my host the pictures do use bandwidth. It takes bandwidth to load the picture. It does not use disc space because it is being stored on another site. But whenever anything is viewed from this site it uses bandwidth.


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## dwagar (Mar 6, 2006)

then, is it possible to limit image file size

and is it possible to sweep the threads of any pix that are too big?


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## Jeff Flowerday (Jan 23, 2006)

GuitarsCanada said:


> Actually according to my host the pictures do use bandwidth. It takes bandwidth to load the picture. It does not use disc space because it is being stored on another site. But whenever anything is viewed from this site it uses bandwidth.


To put it as politely as I can, your host doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground.  The only thing coming from his server is html code with direct links to the picture host sites. TRUST ME!

This post:
http://guitarscanada.com/Board/showpost.php?p=5321&postcount=4

Looks like this in HTML:

<!-- message -->
<div id="post_message_5321">I'll play, after quiting outright about 15 years ago, I have slowly started up again, this is what I've picked up in the last 5 months since I started playing again...much more to come <img src="http://www.guitarscanada.com/Board/images/smilies/DevilGuitar.gif" border="0" alt="" title="DevilGuitar" class="inlineimg" /> <br />
<br />
Moded Parker PM20<br />
<img src="http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g176/SCREEMER123/parker/git-194.jpg" border="0" alt="" /><br />
<br />
'05 American deluxe Strat...SCN pups + S1 switching<br />
<img src="http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g176/SCREEMER123/strat/strat-025.jpg" border="0" alt="" /><br />
<br />
Classic 30 with Hellatone 30 speaker (Peavy logo removed : D)<br />
<img src="http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g176/SCREEMER123/strat/strat-013.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></div>
<!-- / message -->


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## Hamm Guitars (Jan 12, 2007)

Jeff is absolutely correct on this, the client fetches the pictures. The only added load to your server is the line that refers them to the image file, which is basically nothing.

Things like the avatars, smileys and other images native to the site are all that affect your data transfer.

Maybe they are thinking that if you are using VBuliten in cached mode that it is prefetching the images? If so this is not the case, it will only cache local content.


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## dwagar (Mar 6, 2006)

I understand Jeff's logic, and it seems correct to me too. The page isn't being 'built' server side, it's being built by your browser, fetching the pics from the Image Source.

Makes sense to me.


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## Jeff Flowerday (Jan 23, 2006)

Maybe the provider did mean the avatars? They are pretty small already and I would hate to loose them, they add allot of personality to the forum.

Just looked at Dwagar's and it's a whapping 2.89K. The equivalent of 3000 letters ascii or 1500 unicode. I doubt they add even 10% to the bandwidth.


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## dwagar (Mar 6, 2006)

I can't see avatars or smilies causing a problem.

are there any pics on the main page (not the forum) that are big? I could host some stuff on my site if that'd help.


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## GuitarsCanada (Dec 30, 2005)

You are probably right, Jeff. I am not the best at understanding this stuff. I am not sure what we can do to lessen the strain. There are lot's of pics on the main site. Especially in the Guitar Legends section. But overall I cant see that being the big cause of the bandwidth usage.


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## GuitarsCanada (Dec 30, 2005)

Here is an explanation of Bandwidth that I just found on the net.



> What is “bandwidth usage?”
> This refers to the total amount of information that has been served to your web site visitors each month. Every file on your Web Site has a specific size (e.g. 22K). Every time a visitor downloads that file, your bandwidth usage goes up by that amount.
> 
> The larger the file, the higher the bandwidth usage when it is downloaded. The more traffic to your site, the more bandwidth you will use.
> ...


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## Jeff Flowerday (Jan 23, 2006)

I could quit watching "Who's Online" all day. :smile:


Get your provider to tell you what the traffic is hitting, the main site or the forum? There's also a chance that spammers could have robots polling the site trying to break in. I know my website gets hit ever 10-20 seconds by robots. Have any of the search engine robots gone bonkers on us?


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## GuitarsCanada (Dec 30, 2005)

The bots seem to be behaving themselves lately. The main site takes about 300-400 visits per day. The forum is in the thousands.


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## Apostrophe (') (Dec 30, 2007)

With only hundreds or thousands of visitors a day, it seems out of wack to be hitting 30GB. I've seen sites with tens of thousands per day that barely reach 10GB for the month. You must have mp3s or videos on here somewhere.

I'd ask the host if he'll send you the Web site log files. They're just text files that list an entry for each file that has been accessed, and how much bandwidth was used. There's a log file fragment here to give you an idea of what they look like:
http://www.jafsoft.com/searchengines/log_sample.html

Once you have the log files, you can analyze them using something like this:

http://www.alterwind.com/loganalyzer/log-analyzer-lite.html

It should give you a clear indication of which files/pages are using the most bandwidth.

If images are a problem, you can cure it easily by optimizing their sizes. The banner image on your forums is close to 17KB - I loaded it into this software, converted it to an 8 color image and it dropped to under 6KB without much loss in quality. You could do the same thing to the banner on your home page. Based on your stats, I can't see that saving more than 250-500MB a month. It'll save more as your site grows, so it may not be a bad habit to get into.


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## Spikezone (Feb 2, 2006)

A local website that I have posted about on here before, www.portalbernibands.com, is hosted on 1&1, and my friend who runs the site, has a lot of good things to say for them.
-Mikey


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## devnulljp (Mar 18, 2008)

Just found this thread - have a look at baremetal. All the Linux geeks swear by them. Canadian too.
I'm going to move my sites onto their servers as soon as my current leases expire. 

No affiliation, just the best that I've seen so far in Canada.
if you don't mind hosting out of Canada, Pair.com is pretty good and offer very high bandwidth accounts.

You need to see if there's some form of tracking that will allow you to see how your bandwidth is being used. They should be able to present you with logs / graphs showing visits and it should be pretty obvious what is taking up the most bandwidth.


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## Chito (Feb 17, 2006)

25-30GB per month is not a lot of bandwidth. That is less than what my webhost adds up every week to the total bandwidth that is provided in my plan. They start you off with 5TB of bandwidth which increases by 40GB a week. For disk storage, 500GB at startup and an additional 2GB/week is added. Right now I can use as much as 11TB of bandwidth. I have not seen any webhost providing this much. You can have unlimited number of websites. I have 7 websites running, all of which use databases (unlimited), a couple have forums like this too. I even had one when my fiancee and I used to do podcasting. I still have the podcasts stored directly from the server. No issue whatsoever. Oh and I pay $20.00US a month. 

I think I did mention them before, they are not Canadian and based in California. But I've been with them for 8 years now. Never had any problems at all.

I'm no way connected with them. Check it out. www.dreamhost.com


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