As annoying as it may sound, I may be forced to place full page ads on the game pages (but no where else on the site).

The server has already used up 200+ GB worth of bandwidth and it's only the 5th day of the month. I'm only allowed 500 GB. I will have to upgrade to 1 TB bandwidth a month which will cost me an extra $15 a month which makes my monthly cost to have the server at almost $60, definitely need to make more money to afford this and the ads currently aren't making enough to pay for that and I've only received 2 donations to the site so far.

In a week or 2 I'll probably convert all the screenshots images in the game rooms from jpeg to PNG, I could probably cut the file size of those by doing that but 1/5. As for the games, not really much I can do about them.

I was also thinking about placing a 'Donate to the site' thing at the top of the game room to remind people to donate.

If anyone has any ideas or suggestions, please let me know.

Well, the server we're on now goes down everyone now and then.

Maybe investigate in some new hosting?

Resolution: new host.

A new server would still suck up lots of bandwidth though.

If someone can find a cheaper virtual dedicated server than the one I currently have, I'll consider it but if not, than I'm sticking with what I got.

Holy s***! That's a ton of bandwidth! If we go through 200 gigs per 5 days... then we would still run out of bandwidth in 30 days WITH 1 TB of Bandwidth. Would bandwidth use go down if we hosted the games on another site?

Yeah I know that with 1 TB it'd run out in a 30 day period but I'd also work on things to reduce the usage.

Hosting the roms on external sites probably wouldn't work for some of the emulators.

Originally posted by Davideo7

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Hosting the roms on external sites probably wouldn't work for some of the emulators.

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True... also, are GYR and Vizzed running on the same server?

Yeah they are.

I think a huge amount of bandwidth usage though is from the images. We'll see how things are after I optimize the images.

At this rate, even if the new images cut the amount in half, we'd still go over 1 TB this month. I think it's best to try and get some donations

Just Host - Review

I'm only interested in Virtual Dedicated Servers, it seems they don't offer that.

Dave: What's the big difference?

"Offering video and/or audio streaming or downloads, MP3 Files, Games and shareware is also not permitted on any Just Host server."

Also when they say UNLIMITED they don't mean it.

Ras, the difference is speed and performance. If Vizzed was on shared hosting you can bet everything on here would be a lot slower.

David: Could you give me the info on your current hosting plan so I'll know what to compare to?

Switching hosts is just not necessary. It will end up costing more money then staying with the current host. On top of that I doubt David wants to spend hours apon hours fixing database connections, cause once you got a new host the stuff changes, we will need to export and import the database as well, php settings also change too... just not worth it unless you got hours to spent fixing all that.

A quick fix would be to switch to Linux (if possible), save $10 on 500GB plan, save $20 on 1TB plan. Then when you need 2TB switch back to Windows because it ends up being cheaper after 2000GB.

So would you sacrifice RAM for Bandwidth? Or would you like to keep what you currently have and pay an extra $10 - $20 until you need 2TBs?

Windows:
512 MB RAM Guaranteed
500GB Bandwidth
---------------
$49.99

Linux:
256 MB RAM Guaranteed / (1 GB RAM Bursted)
500GB Bandwidth
---------------
$29.99/mo

Windows:
512 MB RAM Guaranteed
1TB Bandwidth
--------------
$73.96/mo

Linux:
256 MB RAM Guaranteed / (1 GB RAM Bursted)
1TB Bandwidth
--------------
$49.98/mo


And then when you need 2TB's you can switch back to Windows because this happens:

Windows:
768 MB RAM Guaranteed
2TB Bandwidth
--------------
$103.95/mo

Linux:
512 MB RAM Guaranteed / (2 GB RAM Bursted)
2TB Bandwidth
--------------
$114.93/mo

So I think overall if possible, switching to Linux would be best until you need 2TB's or else your paying another $20 a month. If you think about it and switch to Linux now, you wont have to pay anything for 1TB because it's about the same price as it is now but if you want Windows prepare to spend another $20

But the problem is that the current server crashes like twice every week, and is rather slow to.

Now if upgrading your hosting plan will fix this then sure, but otherwise we should really look into new hosting.

Probably is crashing because of all the people playing all the games at once too much stress for the server. Another idea is to block posters with 0 posts from the ability to play the games cause they are using a ton of bandwidth I'm sure. Oh well, might as well put in full page ads it's the easiest solution. And yes I agree, Vizzed is getting laggy its taking almost a min to go from one page to another.

Originally posted by JigSaw

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"Offering video and/or audio streaming or downloads, MP3 Files, Games and shareware is also not permitted on any Just Host server."

Also when they say UNLIMITED they don't mean it.

Ras, the difference is speed and performance. If Vizzed was on shared hosting you can bet everything on here would be a lot slower.

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I'm on a server with several people and I haven't seen many sites that can top my speed.....

And yes I know when they say unlimited they dont mean it.

Depends on the host, my old host use to cram 800+ sites on the same server, my current host / same as Vizzed, there's like maybe 20 sites on it so it's not as bad. But still if you got a database, shared hosting is a bad idea especially if there is as much traffic as Vizzed has.

You know, if the pictures are causing a chunk of bandwidth usage, why not just host them externally?
There are plenty of free image hosts we could use and so long as the pictures arnt adult in nature I don't think any would be removed.
Either that or store the images on an external file host.

It might only reduce bandwidth usage a bit, but every bit reduced helps right?