This is a very presumptuous thread, and I'm speculating on things.

There are tons of server problems, and in my opinion, not much that can help fix them except to move to a better server which is more scalable and reliable.

IMO, Chad you need to utilize a CDN (like Amazon S3) to cutdown bandwidth usage so that the server can handle the increased number of queries thanks to the much larger adoption of MI by the student population. This would let you host your static files (stylesheets and images) on a cloud system that would help a LOT.

Those can get pretty expensive though, so I feel like we need a donation drive to keep MI alive.

Thoughts?

I have noticed an increase in server problem messages. Its hard to make suggestions though without knowing current costs, current revenue, and how much possible solutions would cost.

this is more specualtion, but as a thiswebhost customer I know they have been cutting down on CPU and memory use by customers. this could easily be related to the server problems, I only noticed the problems after this* started introducing caps.

i think it would be time to move MacInsiders to dedicated hosting, although that would be more expensive and possibly not covered in the current budget. why is MacInsiders no longer an MSU club, could you not possibly become another media-type, like The Sil? that way you could get funding and remain mostly autonomous.

just my thoughts, maybe you're already on dedicated hosting, in which case... my bad

Originally Posted by stevennevets

why is MacInsiders no longer an MSU club

I'm only going to answer this question, since the other is a lot more difficult to answer than I have the brain power for right now.

There were three exec last year. Chad was graduating and moving on. Temara and I were not sure where we would be, therefore posing the issue of who would actually be running the "club". I decided to return to Mac, but by that time club applications had long been closed.

Originally Posted by lorend

I'm only going to answer this question, since the other is a lot more difficult to answer than I have the brain power for right now.

There were three exec last year. Chad was graduating and moving on. Temara and I were not sure where we would be, therefore posing the issue of who would actually be running the "club". I decided to return to Mac, but by that time club applications had long been closed.

I dunno how clubs work, but it wasn't possible to have like, dedicated users of the site take over the exec positions "officially," but still have you three running the thing?

Originally Posted by lawleypop

I dunno how clubs work, but it wasn't possible to have like, dedicated users of the site take over the exec positions "officially," but still have you three running the thing?

We didn't have dedicated enough staff members last year in order to do so.

that's reasonable. I wasn't sure if you had a falling out with the msu

Originally Posted by stevennevets

that's reasonable. I wasn't sure if you had a falling out with the msu

Nope. I was a PTM last year and still have a fair amount of MSU love.

Originally Posted by stevennevets

that's reasonable. I wasn't sure if you had a falling out with the msu

No that was me.

Hey all,

Thanks for the support and suggestions. There's a few questions that came up so I'll try answer them separately.

To answer Rohan, right now we are on a shared hosting server with ThisWebHost. They have been great to us, and are miles above our last host that we started out with when we launched MacInsiders back in 2006 as a small advice site. As the user base has grown, we've grown the site - more features, more staff, and a new hosting company. Unfortunately the next step is quite a jump, going to a dedicated server, and as you mentioned... it's expensive. Very expensive. We're talking a difference of $100/yr to $100-200/month ($1200/yr).

Which brings us to stevennevets's topic of budget. MacInsiders budget is basically nothing. All costs come out of pocket, and are covered from the advertising on the site. Luckily it's affordable enough to run with the current structure we have set up and we don't need to seek further funding.

Onto the topic of MSU/Clubs. We've looked into all the options, trust me. As an alumni of McMaster, I wanted to keep the legacy going as a club - but had ambitions to turn what was at the time an MSU Club into an MSU Service (ie. at the same level as The Sil and funded entirely by the MSU). Danielle and I approached the MSU to talk about options and while they liked what we were doing and found it to be a great resource for students, simply weren't interested in taking it on in it's present state without taking it apart in some way. It came down to politics/liabilities behind the openness MacInsiders gives our members with having a public forum, as well as the fact that they saw MacInsiders as having features that overlapped with or would be duplicated with their new portal website that was in the works and being released. If you recall, they later launched their own user system on the msumcmaster.ca portal and tried to replicate having community features such as their own forum (which isn't very active), news on their homepage, blogs for the staff, videos, an event calendar, etc. all of which we already had.

Plus, they felt that being under the arm of the MSU would change the vibe of the community since it wouldn't be independent anymore. As for being a completely MSU-funded autonomous separate entity (ie. like The Sil), they never really addressed it. However, the idea of there being an official service posting announcements/news/opinion pieces online (with The Sil having planned to launch their new website at the time) there was obviously some overlap there too.

As for being an MSU Club, to answer your question Lawleypop, it is possible for dedicated members to take on exec roles and apply to be a club. However, we found that MacInsiders really didn't fit well within the restrictions and guidelines set forth by the MSU. Being a club requires the exec to run events, hold meetings regularly on campus, have a bank account with CIBC (which takes a whopping fee each month just to hold an account even if it goes into a negative balance), and the funding given is very small and is reimbursement-only, not given upfront. It isn't possible to simply take a few members, sign a club application, and enjoy free MSU funding... otherwise everyone would be doing that haha. The policies are in place so that you do have to work to maintain club status and requires a lot of on-campus involvement, while we're our efforts are mainly online rather than offline (excluding the odd social event we run ).

As for putting together a dedicated volunteer team, we've tried this multiple times. From putting together teams on campus and having bi-weekly meetings, to having a network of the most frequently active users on the site help us moderate and write homepage pieces (our "Insider Agents"). However, it's very hard to come by people who have the drive and passion to keep at it year-round, and continually write articles and content. There's so much going on at McMaster and the surrounding community that it's impossible for a person to know everything or ask them to spend time researching (these are volunteer positions, not paid positions like at The Sil). The model that seems to be working is a combination of the exec staff (Danielle and Temara who are doing a fantastic job putting a great deal of effort and time into gathering and posting up content - thanks girls!), our best and most active IA Staff Team members (thanks team!), and leaving content submission open to our user community which we've seen really explode in popularity and usage as compared to this time last year. Users are submitting announcements for their services, clubs, and affiliations when they find it most convenient for them such as when they are hosting an event or have heard something. Some users only post once, some post announcements regularly... so giving that flexibility is what is needed. However, we've unfortunately seen less articles being posted since we don't have any part/full-time paid staff to continually write those advice/opinion pieces.

Quote:
Originally Posted by stevennevets
that's reasonable. I wasn't sure if you had a falling out with the msu

We love the MSU, and they show love back! There are many people within the MSU that use MacInsiders on a regular basis and are very active within the MI community, we've been complimented by staff and been congratulated personally on our success on many different occasions. Plus we were awarded MSU Club Of The Year, so there's nothing of that nature going on haha. We're very thankful to the MSU since they really helped us jumpstart the site and have been supporting us since the beginning. Without the MSU we wouldn't have been able to get the initial funding we needed to host our big launch events on campus, had the space available to promote ourselves, been able to attend Clubsfest which got us our initial user base, or been able to garner as much attention as we did. Quick thanks: Julie Ella (former clubs admin) was a huge part of that and it was because of her support that we were able to do many of the things we did to get to where we are now. As an alumni now of McMaster, I personally was unable to re-apply for club status since you need to be a full-time student, and Danielle explained the other reasoning.

Hey Chad,

Check this out. http://aws.amazon.com/s3/

Host your static content on there etc. Look into it. It's good for stuff at the usage level of MI.

I've definitely heard about and read about S3. Are there any free options to host content on their cloud servers (eg. free account with limited space?). What is annoying is that our host which we're paying for SHOULD be able to support our site and run/load quickly.

Update: I've optimized some of the settings through our vBulletin system so that the 'server overload' message shouldn't come up as often - if not at all. It'll try rendering the page even when it gets really busy. Let me know if it helps.

Time to AJAXify stuff -- login box, quick reply box etc. It'll cut down on server requests.

The site runs on vbulletin which is quite a complex system. There are addons, and we use a lot of them, but custom coding would be expensive. I was actually looking at an ajax addon for quick replies that shows your reply immediately, I'll see if I can install it soon.

I've turned on gzip and have tried optimizing the settings by tweaking things a bit, let me know if you notice a performance difference. Any other suggestions are definitely welcome. I think part of it is that this template theme is also pretty messy as it's been added to over the years. The stylesheets and code definitely could be cleaned up but would take a lot of time, of which I don't have right now haha. Any help you can give, i'm open to it!