Topic: Help DriverPacks.net get a Virtual Private Server!
Let's face it. The DriverPacks.net site isn't fast, it's slow as h*ll. The forum is fast though, but it's quirky every now and then: sometimes you have to resubmit your post up to 10 times before it really gets submitted. And the bugtracker isn't working properly, because the ISP of the web server currently has a MySQL version installed that's got a bug in it, and they can't update it because it's tied into their control panel software.
When I announced the opensourcing of this project, I never meant to leave this project. Nor did I. In the past few months I've spent very little time on the DriverPacks, muiz & ruudboek did most of the work there. I did do some work on the BASE though.
But most of the time I've been spending at getting to know Drupal, which is a very extensible and modular CMS framework. It's great. It will allow me to merge the main web site, forum and bugtracker into one site, while not losing the current forum and bugtracker: it's possible to import them! Yes: single sign on from then.
It won't stop there. A manual will be included in the web site as well, with some wiki-like editing abilities for logged in users and moderators will be able to approve changes.
And that's not the end either. This is not yet ready, but being worked on: a true driver database, to which any logged in user will be able to submit updated drivers and then they will be moderated (approved/disapproved) by the DriverPacks Team. In a later phase - when the driverDB will have been proven stable - the ability for client applications to interact it will be added as well, primarily for the DriverPacks BASE of course, but also for anybody else to interact with it. That's right. An API for the driverDB (will be through XML-RPC for sure, since it's well supported by Drupal).
Although for all these niceties to run snappy, I will need to be able to set up a custom hosted environment: it will need a fast MySQL server, PHP with a cache installed (eAccellerator or APC), the ability to install custom Apache modules (WebDAV for uploading large drivers), et cetera. A dedicated server is out of our reach: at least 160 USD/month. A "Virtual Private Server" is possible though: if we pay for an entire year, it costs 39.96 USD/month, plus a 25 USD setup fee, so 504.52 USD in total.
We need your help to achieve this!
Initially, the web site will just be noticably faster. When the new web site is ready though, you will still have an equally snappy web site, but with much more features.
Here's some statistics to show you why it's really becoming critical to move this project to the next level:
Web site statistics
In the entire year of 2006, the main web site, i.e. http://driverpacks.net/, had 528,528 visits, 352,373 unique visitors and generating a grand total of 3,300,936 pageviews.And since May 26, 2006, our own forum was online: http://forum.driverpacks.net/. In little over half a year it had 177,613 visits, 120,120 unique visitors and 738,991 pageviews.
Some location/language/browser/connection statistics
24 percent of our visitors come from the United States, 7 percent from Germany, 6% from the U.K., 5% from France and Russia, 4.5% from China, 4% from Canada, 3% from Poland and Australia.For more than 50% of all visits, English (either U.S. or British English) was set as the browser language.
52% of our users use Internet Explorer, 38 % use Firefox/Mozilla and 8% use Opera.
72% uses broadband, 10% uses dialup, 5% have corporate internet connections and of the remaining users it is unknown.
Download statistics
The DriverPacks BASE was downloaded 20,000-25,000 times each month on average, but at the end of the year this has been rapidly increasing, in the first half of January 2007 alone there were 45,000 downloads of the BASE, which forced me to move the BASE to the thesneaky.com server as well.Since January 22, 2006, up till today (27 January 2007), these are the statistics for the main download server (thesneaky.com). Since March 2006 or so, all DriverPacks were served from this server, except for the BASE, which was hosted on DriverPacks.net until mid-January.
(Figures in parentheses refer to the 7-day period ending Jan 27 2007 at 4:23 AM.)
Successful requests: 4,285,502 (181,662)
Average successful requests per day: 11,655 (25,951)
Data transferred: 11.29 terabytes (298.45 gigabytes)
Average data transferred per day: 31.44 gigabytes (42.64 gigabytes)Note that these numbers are not the same as the true number of downloads of the DriverPacks. In the past download managers weren't blocked, and now they are, although partial downloads are still allowed. Nevertheless, these numbers remain HUGE. If I had received 0.25 USD per download request, I'd have become a millionaire in just one year...
If you take the current average daily amount of data transferred, that is 42 gigabytes, and you see how much that is per second, you end up at 0.4977 MB per second. That's half a megabyte per second (or 4 Mbit/sec), 24/7!
If you look at the entire year period, that's 31.44 gigabytes/day, or still 0.4471 MB per second, during more than a year, 24/7!!!
UPDATE: Helmi has sent 25 USD directly to me, to avoid a 15% fee charged by his credit card company, so I simply lowered the goal by 25 USD.
UPDATE: The ChipIn widget wasn't loading in FireFox, I've now fixed that.
And this is already with a discount, if you pay monthly, it'd cost 50 USD/month.
