My bother and I have created a monster!

[MAC]

My bother and I have created a monster!

Making wierd Need for Speed 3 (a computer racing game) cars is the hobby of my little brother (14 years old). Everyone we showed them to loved the cars. So I thought, "Why not make a website for these cars?"

So I did, and the responce has been tremendous! (to me anyway) Our website appeared on the Altavista search engine the day before yesterday. In the last 17 hours 60 cars have been downloaded. All of these from Altavista alone.

The problem is that if this increases (like when another search engine finally indexs us), we'll go over our mothly bandwidth and start having to pay extra. These cars that eveyone loves will be draining money from out of our pockets!

I looked at banner advertising, but it would not even pay costs.

Burst claims a $3.00 average CPM. Since they would get half , I would only get $0.0015 per page viewed. A single download would cost $0.008, and I only get three page views per download.

Since the site is extremly targeted, and people love it, would it be possible to get a higher CPM?

Any other ideas on how to get this thing to at least cover cost? Good ideas are welcome!

[Matt Mickiewicz]

How about hosting the actual files for download on another server to cut down on bandwidth usage?

[MAC]

So find a sever with an extremely low bandwidth cost just for the downloads? Good Idea! I will be looking around.

[aspen]

I didn't know so I checked how big a DL a car was. It was only 800kb

I don't know what server package you have but 60 cars would only be around 60mb, all the hosting accounts I have offer atleast 7gb bandwidth, which would be 7000 cars.

But if you're that concerned about bandwidth I think you'd need a new hosting provider, find one with unlimited bandwidth usage.

Actually hypermart is unlimited bandwidth usage and that is free, or get their pay service for $5 a month and host like 25 cars and get unlimited bandwidth.

http://www.promitech.net/

that company offers an unlimited bandwidth package for 19.95

and there are others too I'm sure.

Chris

[MAC]

The download car sizes are 829K to 1,103K.

In one day (yesterday) we had 77megs of downloads. Over one month's time that is 2.3 gigs. The "problem" is that all of this is comming from ONE search engine. What happens when we get listed on Yahoo, Open Directory, ect...

I will be looking at a second host for the downloads.

I'm a little concerned that an "Unlimited Bandwidth" host might just kick us off, when our bandwith gets to high.

[OllieO]

Just use free hosts like tripod, xoom etc.

[SoldierMail]

I suggest switching host. Don't host on Geocities.com or Tripod cause eventually they are going to delete them. Host the files on a server like Netherweb.com or find someone with a higher bandwidth rate.

[Gone Away...]

I believe Hispeed.com has unlimited bandwidth and space for $9.95 (or $19.95 for domain hosting.) I can't speak for their service though.

Check http://www.hostinvestigator.com for reviews or other options.

[Nicky]

Have you tried selling advertising via direct contacts, for example people who actually sell the computer game or something like that?

[psxextreme]

Sounds like your host is overcharging you. I can highly recommend SoftCom (softcomca.com). They offer unlimited bandwith, we used to use them some time ago and even at 10,000 unique visitors a day (about 40Gigs of traffic/month) the server didn't have any problems and the company never said anything to me about it. I love that company and still use them for another site that gets around 3K a day. Oh yeah, and I still don't understand how they do it at $9.99 a month.

[MAC]

Thanks for all the responses

After looking at all the Ad networks, I signed up with
www.fastclick.com . From what I have heard and seen they are very good. I got signed up very quicky. I like being about to pick the banners that appear on my site. That was extremly importent to me. When you see cheap or offensive banners, you think "cheap site". Fastclick also gives you very good web stats. (That's not a big deal for me though, I'm building my own as a learning experince.) The CPM was also the best I could find from an Ad Network for a site of this size.

"Have you tried selling advertising via direct contacts, for example people who actually sell the computer game or something like that?"
I haven't. I guess I figuerd it was too much trouble, and that the site was too small.

"Sounds like your host is overcharging you."
This site is hosted with http://www.kyryogen.com . Compared with the other hosting company I'm using, http://www.cetlink.com , the prices are not too bad. Thanks for all the recomendations.

[Son Nguyen]

Try hostrocket or tera-byte, they offer pretty high bandwidth, and not very expensive!

I've seen some negative posts about fastclick, but haven't tried myself!

[Aidan Bahta]

I really like NFS3! I went to the site and got an error...what happened? Did you get kicked already?

[MAC]

I'm hosted with kryogen.com . Unfortuanly they have been having lots of reliabily problems. The whole website has been down for a twelve hour period twice in the last three weeks.

abahta: You'll just have to wait until morning.

123finder.com:
I'll keep you updated on fastclick. So far they are good, but I have not reached the point where they should send me money.

[Aidan Bahta]

Originally posted by MAC
abahta: You'll just have to wait until morning.

What happened?

The first time I checked, I had a Cannot fin server error, now there is a MySQL error.

[MAC]

What happened?

I wish I knew! Here is a responce to my question after a previous outage:

you had earlier asked the reason for the downtime. This is what we have found from the logs .. due to high mysql loads, the server went down. however, we have recently not added any new mysql clients, so our best guess is that it is a runaway script doing reoccuring searches. this is also what caused the mysql errors you noticed earlier . at present mysql is being monitored and when such load problems reoccur, we would track down and contact the client causing them. mysql logs do not show any abnormal activity.

[Aidan Bahta]

Oh, that would explain it

Originally posted by OllieO
Just use free hosts like tripod, xoom etc.

Just thought I'd say that free hosts like tripod and xoom would probably delete your acct if it uses a lot of bandwidth.

[Hierophant]

Originally posted by MAC

What happened?

I wish I knew! Here is a responce to my question after a previous outage:

you had earlier asked the reason for the downtime. This is what we have found from the logs .. due to high mysql loads, the server went down. however, we have recently not added any new mysql clients, so our best guess is that it is a runaway script doing reoccuring searches. this is also what caused the mysql errors you noticed earlier . at present mysql is being monitored and when such load problems reoccur, we would track down and contact the client causing them. mysql logs do not show any abnormal activity.

It sounds to me like they are looking for the source of the problem. I personally speak with the owner of Kryogen and know that he will do his best to solve the problem immediately. Unfortunately, the tools available for administering multiple MySQL databases are limited compared to other Database products. On the primary Oracle server at my work, the DBA on duty gets paged immediately when any process goes over 1% resource usage. I don't believe this is currently possible in MySQL but it might be possible in Linux itself.

The best thing you could do to help the situation is to work on optimizing your database and your scripts. Are you running queries against un-indexed fields. Set your script timeouts to a decent length like 20 seconds to prevent extra work if something is failing. There are a lot of things you can do to lower your own resource usage. If everyone did this then the server wouldn't have a problem.