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Is the price of bandwidth the biggest factor in the demise of so many dot-whatevers? I know my colo provider charges a bunch for bandwidth, so I'm afraid to host successful sites. The cost of the server isn't the big deal, nor the cost of maintenance. It's that you pay for every visit - even the spiders indexing you and spammers trolling for addresses.
If the cost of bandwidth is the main problem, is anybody anywhere trying to do anything about it? Who's at the top of the food chain here? What are their interests? Are there other ways they can be fed?
I'm sure I'm not the only one wondering this. . . where am I gonna be able to find MPEG'd versions of next year's Super Bowl commercials now? It's often the only sports game I watch all year, and really just for the commercials -- but I like to download the funny ones afterwards. Can someone else recommend another site that might archive the Superbowl ads?
Also, their Investment Page [adcritic.com] is still up, so you can get some idea of the shear amount of traffic they receive -- 32,500,000 videos streamed last January alone (that's a lot of bandwidth)!
In case anyone misses the irony, this is a site where people go looking for ads -- you'd think it's the perfect market for any advertisements. If banner ads can't succeed even here, then the future of free websites isn't looking too bright.
Ummm, we realized there is no money to be made by showing ads for free...
It's an interesting comment on our culture that AdCritic existed in the first place; that ads have become entertainment. While *insert-network-here* would probably be rather upset if a site copied and posted *insert-hit-tv-show-here* onto a web site, I don't think advertisers (product or agency) ever complained about getting extra viewers for their ads...
Are we moving towards a society where the value of product placement will cover the whole cost of entertainment and we'll be able to get free copies of *insert-new-hit-movie-here* because it'll be completely filled with Dr. Pepper backdrops?
Although personally, I don't feel any grief that humanity has just eradicated the last known resovoir of "Where's the Beef!" I bet the CDC felt this way when they eradicated Smallpox.
I was / am running with two other guys swma.net a website that is / was showing Star Wars Graphics / Models (The Star Wars Modelin Alliance).
We're offline for the past six months because we couldn't find a deal that we can afford.
Right now we push around 300 GB / MONTH but as soon as the new movie comes up we are toast, I am sure it'll jump above 500 GB, and believe me: There is NO hoster who can give us a deal under $1500/ month for this amount of bandwidth.
We might be back as we got a sponsor, but I have no clue how we are going to server all the people who are going to swarm it again without killing our donor off again....
Advertising doesn't pay, and a tip jar gave us 20 bucks in 3 months. Gee, thanks.
CD-R archive of the site. Sell those at cafepress if they'll let 'em. I'd rather shell out $10 for that than wait to download 650MB of.mov files. Have multiple volumes. Have best of. Sell the '01 Superbowl commercials on a CD by themselves. The '00 election commercials. C'mon, it's too damn easy to make money . . .
The bandwidth payment model is kinda broken. Mobile phones really took off once it became established that you pay for _making_ calls and not so much for receiving them (though a flat line-rental charge is acceptable). It shouldn't cost a site more if it's popular; rather, the users requesting pages should pay for the bandwith they consume. (This is a tiny amount of money, and it's not the same as micropayments - you really are paying for usage of a scarce resource, and it's between you and your ISP.)
The trouble is that for marketing reasons ISPs want to offer nominally flat-rate services (even though in reality they'll kick you off for going above some arbitrary limit) but hosting companies charge for actual usage. And there is AFAIK no payment structure to decide who is 'responsible' for a connection - just packet counting. Billing the side which initiates a TCP connection would be a reasonable first approximation.
Another way out would be for small or hobbyist sites to run throttling webservers and stop serving pages temporarily when some quota of bandwidth runs out. However, the pages would remain accessible through web caches. This would lead to a demand from users that ISPs run a decent http cache, again pushing some of the responsibility for the surfing habits of 'random hordes' onto the ISP rather than the (un)lucky website.
Freenet is nifty and all, but it lacks a few important things: content control for synchronous updates or deletions, an HTTP gateway, and so on.
(I know, I know, these things are largely orthogonal to the purposes of Freenet. This is kind of my point. Read on.)
I've always liked the Akamai model-- static content is distributed to edge servers, and users are directed to their optimum edge server by magic. (If I knew how Akamai did it, I'd be doing it myself instead of talking to you freaks.)
The thing with that model is that you can put plain old HREFs on plain old web pages, and instead of the content being served by one NetBSD box (or whatever) that explodes every time Taco even thinks of posting a link to it, the actual content comes off these load-balanced servers all over the world.
There's only one problem with this: it can be either really expensive, or really unreliable. I haven't been able to figure out how to make it both cheap and robust.
Ideally, the vision would be something like the seti@home model: download a little screensaver to your computer. You configure how much disk space you want to allocate for the program, and then you walk away. The server on your computer registers itself with a central broker, and starts receiving data fragments to cache. (I guess each file-- image or movie or document or whatever-- would have to be on a single server, because it would have to be served up by a single HTTP request.)
When you're away from your computer, it acts like a little caching edge server for web content. When you sit down and start using your computer, it drops off the content network until it's idle again.
Because every request goes through a central request broker, the system should be able to handle edge servers coming on and dropping off the network all the time.
Okay, so there'd have to be a central authority to handle all requests... but there wouldn't necessarily have to be just one central authority. Say I set up "webcache.org" (although that name is taken) and you access content on it by going to "http://webcache.org/cachemonster.cgi?somerandomst ring." Then the guy down the block sets up "getyerowncache.org" and does the same thing, only URLs to his cache network would have to go through "http://getyerowncache.org/...." But all the content lives on a single network, and every broker talks to every edge server.
(How do the edge servers know about the brokers? Why, through a central registry, of course. Look, if I had it all figured out, I would have done it by now!)
I dunno. Maybe it's a dumb idea. But I don't think so. I just don't have time to work on it.
Step right up, folks! I'm givin' 'em away for free, here!
I'm actually wondering *why* bandwidth seems to cost so much. You're really only moving very small bits of electricity down a wire -- you don't have the costs of housing huge servers and keeps OS's up and running to handle them (yes, I know there are costs in setting up a router, but really it's just a "setup-once, forget it" kind of thing, outside of occasional security maintenance).
I sometimes think bandwidth is the gasoline of high-tech: a relatively inexpensive resource, presumably finite, that companies can charge extra for when they feel it is "necessary". Hopefully, bandwidth will follow current trends and ride waves of up-and-down prices like gasoline.
I think/.'s saving grace will be that if the money ever DOES run out, the readers will keep it alive. I know there are probably hundreds if not thousands of people here on/. who would be willing to host this site. If it were done in a round-robin style of hosting, every geek in the country could get a week of hosting slashdot to notch his belt. It could easily become a rite of passage for the entire community.
Peter Beckman (ex]Founder of AdCritic.com) posted himself that news over FuckedCompany.com: see it and the following discussion here [fuckedcompany.com].
Is it the price of bandwidth? (Score:5, Interesting)
If the cost of bandwidth is the main problem, is anybody anywhere trying to do anything about it? Who's at the top of the food chain here? What are their interests? Are there other ways they can be fed?
Of All Times... (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, their Investment Page [adcritic.com] is still up, so you can get some idea of the shear amount of traffic they receive -- 32,500,000 videos streamed last January alone (that's a lot of bandwidth)!
In case anyone misses the irony, this is a site where people go looking for ads -- you'd think it's the perfect market for any advertisements. If banner ads can't succeed even here, then the future of free websites isn't looking too bright.
"Reason Why..." (Score:3, Interesting)
It's an interesting comment on our culture that AdCritic existed in the first place; that ads have become entertainment. While *insert-network-here* would probably be rather upset if a site copied and posted *insert-hit-tv-show-here* onto a web site, I don't think advertisers (product or agency) ever complained about getting extra viewers for their ads...
Are we moving towards a society where the value of product placement will cover the whole cost of entertainment and we'll be able to get free copies of *insert-new-hit-movie-here* because it'll be completely filled with Dr. Pepper backdrops?
Although personally, I don't feel any grief that humanity has just eradicated the last known resovoir of "Where's the Beef!" I bet the CDC felt this way when they eradicated Smallpox.
Re:archive.org (Score:2, Interesting)
where is everyone going to go after the next superbowl?
Re:Is it the price of bandwidth? (Score:3, Interesting)
I was / am running with two other guys swma.net a website that is / was showing Star Wars Graphics / Models (The Star Wars Modelin Alliance).
We're offline for the past six months because we couldn't find a deal that we can afford.
Right now we push around 300 GB / MONTH but as soon as the new movie comes up we are toast, I am sure it'll jump above 500 GB, and believe me: There is NO hoster who can give us a deal under $1500/ month for this amount of bandwidth.
We might be back as we got a sponsor, but I have no clue how we are going to server all the people who are going to swarm it again without killing our donor off again....
Advertising doesn't pay, and a tip jar gave us 20 bucks in 3 months. Gee, thanks.
Michael
Re:Is it the price of bandwidth? (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm not affiliated with them, just know someone that rents a RAQ4 from them.
what I'd pay for right now (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Is it the price of bandwidth? (Score:4, Interesting)
The trouble is that for marketing reasons ISPs want to offer nominally flat-rate services (even though in reality they'll kick you off for going above some arbitrary limit) but hosting companies charge for actual usage. And there is AFAIK no payment structure to decide who is 'responsible' for a connection - just packet counting. Billing the side which initiates a TCP connection would be a reasonable first approximation.
Another way out would be for small or hobbyist sites to run throttling webservers and stop serving pages temporarily when some quota of bandwidth runs out. However, the pages would remain accessible through web caches. This would lead to a demand from users that ISPs run a decent http cache, again pushing some of the responsibility for the surfing habits of 'random hordes' onto the ISP rather than the (un)lucky website.
Re:A need for Distributed Content Storage (Score:3, Interesting)
(I know, I know, these things are largely orthogonal to the purposes of Freenet. This is kind of my point. Read on.)
I've always liked the Akamai model-- static content is distributed to edge servers, and users are directed to their optimum edge server by magic. (If I knew how Akamai did it, I'd be doing it myself instead of talking to you freaks.)
The thing with that model is that you can put plain old HREFs on plain old web pages, and instead of the content being served by one NetBSD box (or whatever) that explodes every time Taco even thinks of posting a link to it, the actual content comes off these load-balanced servers all over the world.
There's only one problem with this: it can be either really expensive, or really unreliable. I haven't been able to figure out how to make it both cheap and robust.
Ideally, the vision would be something like the seti@home model: download a little screensaver to your computer. You configure how much disk space you want to allocate for the program, and then you walk away. The server on your computer registers itself with a central broker, and starts receiving data fragments to cache. (I guess each file-- image or movie or document or whatever-- would have to be on a single server, because it would have to be served up by a single HTTP request.)
When you're away from your computer, it acts like a little caching edge server for web content. When you sit down and start using your computer, it drops off the content network until it's idle again.
Because every request goes through a central request broker, the system should be able to handle edge servers coming on and dropping off the network all the time.
Okay, so there'd have to be a central authority to handle all requests... but there wouldn't necessarily have to be just one central authority. Say I set up "webcache.org" (although that name is taken) and you access content on it by going to "http://webcache.org/cachemonster.cgi?somerandoms
(How do the edge servers know about the brokers? Why, through a central registry, of course. Look, if I had it all figured out, I would have done it by now!)
I dunno. Maybe it's a dumb idea. But I don't think so. I just don't have time to work on it.
Step right up, folks! I'm givin' 'em away for free, here!
Re:Is it the price of bandwidth? (Score:3, Interesting)
I sometimes think bandwidth is the gasoline of high-tech: a relatively inexpensive resource, presumably finite, that companies can charge extra for when they feel it is "necessary". Hopefully, bandwidth will follow current trends and ride waves of up-and-down prices like gasoline.
Re: When will Slashdot fall? (Troll -1) (Score:2, Interesting)
fuckedcompany.com (Score:2, Interesting)