Furnation To Go Offline Again
Posted by Anon on Tue 10 Sep 2002 - 21:56
Furnation will go offline again tonight because they exceeded the 100 GB transfer limit. The message was posted in the FurNation message forum and was posted by the Administrator. FurNation will be back up when they find a new service provider who can allocate more bandwidth.
Comments
Heh.. either that or have the artists ship in and make their websites less bandwidth hoggy... some of the stuff I've seen.. jeesh.. 300 dpi pics, etc...
Furnation is a 100 ton beast. They really need to start charging for at least some of their webhosting services. This might allow them to maintain stability and uptime. And it's certainly better than begging for money every few months.
Furnation is a 100 ton beast. They really need to start charging for at least some of their webhosting services. This might allow them to maintain stability and uptime. And it's certainly better than begging for money every few months.
Or use throttling software to either keep the total load down to something manageable, implement user bandwidth quotas (either as cutoffs or throttles), or both.
Actually, I think that the idea of them offering free hosting is pretty good. They only ask donations, which isn't a bad thing. And they sell t-shirts, sweatshirts, and mousepads now to help out with the money. It's a good site, and I think that when they get the service proiblem stablized, it will be up and running flawlessly.
They can't stabilize the service problem if they can't pay for the bandwidth they keep (over)using. Donations obviously aren't going very far towards paying enough to keep the service stable.
"Pretty good" and "usable" are two different things. If the site can only be up for a week or two at best per month before hitting their provider's cap they're of no real use to the people they're hosting, free or not. Or maybe people find it acceptable to be offline 50% of the time so long as they don't have to pay any money. Me, I would (and do) pay for reliability.
If Furnation is as good a site as people claim it is, they should be perfectly willing to put their money where their mouthes are and shill out a few dollars per month as a subscription to keep it online and prevent these random interruptions.
-Feren
"We use them for divine retribution."
FurNation has proven to be reliable, actually. Before the upgrading and server problems, they were always up. At least, whenever I went there in the past 5 years, they were.
I say give them another chance to straighten the service thing out, and get the upgrading done. It will be an even better site than it ever was. Not to mention, they have some of the best artists.
Donations did work, but I suppose they didn't think they'd reach their transer limit so quickly. So they have to find another ISP. I'm willing to wait, and dying to see what it will be like when the site is complete.
Hmmmmm.... something like a buck per month ( or other unspecified time period)? I think a free service is badly needed in the fur community - that's how FN got to be the standard in fur websites - but perhaps those who don't pay have bandwidth restrictions?
I'm more than capable of shelling out twelve bucks a year or something. And a buck per month per FN user adds up to be a heap of funds.
Something along the lines of the LiveJournal business model would probably work. LJ has both free and paid users...paid users get faster servers, more user icons, and some other feature perks. For $25 a year. And the site, despite being wildly successful, and a big bandwidth hog, isn't having any problems staying online.
New Furnation Hosting Guidelines
-----------------------------------
Starting immediately, Furnation will begin monthly billing for users based on the following guidelines.
Base hosting fee: 2.00$ / mo
Per image:
-------------
Number of inches over 6: 1.00$ / in
Number of spilled pints over 1: 2.00$ / pint
Breast size over 38 DD: .50$ / in + 1.00$ / cup
Number of mixed species in one character over 3: 5$ / species
Butterfly wings: 2.00$ (Thanks to Furcadia for inspiration)
Images colored in MS Paint: 5$ / image
Images colored with warezed copy of Photoshop: 5$ / image
Images colored badly using Flood Fill with warezed copy of Photoshop: 15$ / image
Prominent Lens Flare on glasses, jewelry or weapon: 20$ / image
General lack of any sense of proportion or perspective, otherwise regardless of talent: 25$ / image
Depiction of certain acts illegal even in the red light districts of Thailand: 40$ / image
...involving farm animals: +10$
...involving Disney characters: +15$
...involving Sonic the hedgehog: +20$
General:
----------
Personal therianthropic essay on page hosted by a character posessing a mythical species: 5$
Vague, rambling, apologetic "What is a furry?" essay: 10$
Sharing a Furnation handle with another user differentiated only by hyphenation or alternate spelling: 20$
Taking this list too seriously and getting huffy and offended: Free
For everything else there's MasterCard.
SA Net can do 330 GB / mo transfer for 90$ -
http://www.sanethosting.com/pricing.htm
Would be somewhat interesting to have Something Awful hosting Furnation, now wouldn't it?
How 'bout individual bandwidth limits? Each individual user site has a limit, which if exceeded, that piece alone cannot be accessed. Leaving the rest of Furnation up.
But wait! There's more! To get their pages back up, they can pay extra bandwidth charges to Furnation to cover the cost Furnation has in turn...or they can pay a lower monthly charge for higher bandwidth limits all the time.
If they don't want to pony up the dough, they can try optimizing their site. As was said before, some images there are decidedly gargantuan. (At least, so they say. I have not seen such files recently myself, as it's been a while since I browsed around Furnation. But I do know about optimizing, since I have my own minimally-paid-for website and an account on the VCL, where image size limits are code-enforced [i.e. if it's over the limit, you simply can't upload it], so I know about keeping image size down to optimal levels.)
Smile! The world could use another happy person.
I FEEL THE OWNER OF OUR BULLENTIN BOARD
ONLINE SERVICES HAVE THE RIGHT TO GO
OFFLINE,SO THEY CAN EFFECTIVELY IMPROVE
THEY OPERATION, FOR ALL OF US TO ENJOY WHAT GOING ON IN THE FURRY WORLD.
YOU KNOW MAY BE RATHER THEN COMPLANING LET
HELP THEM BY DONATING ANY FINANCIAL
SUPPORT SO THEY CAN COME ONLINE FASTER.
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