MiniRiders' Technical Issues

The problem stems from the site now being hosted by a hosting server in Dallas Texas. You get what you pay for basically.

You're right, but to host the site in Australia, we'd be looking at paying $300-600 more a month for a similar service and even then we'd probably eat up more bandwidth than we'd be allocated. The state of the internet here is pretty poor.

hey robb what is the cost you pay a month if you dont mind me asking or if you cant say dont worry bout it

also i havnt had one problem with the site in the last 8 months i been here
only when u were doing the server change not anytime after it its been sweet since then

__________________

NEWCASTLE RACE DAY - 8TH FEB
http://www.miniriders.com.au/forum/r...tml#post196646

BE THERE!


-05 CRF50F...SOLD SOLD...
Strengthened and powdercoated black frame...
Powdercoated black upper forks...
Five0 Red/Yellow team graphics...
Fastace rear shock...
UNI filter...
Red baron tall seat...
Red baron BMX bar kit...
Exhaust mod...
Choke mod...

Man, someone was pulling the wool over your eyes if they recon it would cost that for Australian hosting.

How much bandwidth do you use a month ? For a site with 700 odd active users.

And hosting in the US is what, $10 a month unlimited ?

P.S. I work for a hosting company, im sure I could get you a good deal.
US servers are slow and troublesome ... support AUSTRALIA I say.
Fast, high speed data centres here in Australia are the only way to go.

I have had a look through the WebStats for miniriders you posted in the advertisers section.

The alarming statistics are that you have a bounce rate of over 40% ... meaning people are hitting the site, not finding what they want and leaving without going any further. Thats a shocking rate of non conversion.

And with the site listing 8000 odd members, and only an active member base of 700, your doing something terribly wrong.

Dude ... you need help

@motoXXX, I'm not sure. I think it's around $50-100 USD a month, though I don't pay for hosting, my mate does it.

@fastace - We do have a lot of registered users unfortunately, most accounts on here are created by spam bots and users creating dupe accounts - spammers, you can't beat them.

You're absolutely right that the site could be more active though. I think the main thing that needs to be done is a highly tweaked theme that reduces the number of DB queries and the number of objects on pages. Also a theme where we read dark text on a light background can increase user activity and loyalty.

We're on a VPS at the moment and we're hitting around half a million pageviews per month and around 40gb of bandwidth - not to mention how much ram the site chews up. Last time I checked, Aussie hosting that can satisfy our needs would cost a fortune. You'd probably have a better idea than I would about Aussie hosting, though.

As for bouncerate, it's pretty typical of a lot of forums (see Google Analytics' Industry Benchmarking data) and considering the majority (over 80%) of traffic is coming from search engine visitors who are looking for precise information and bouncing, I'd say it's not too bad. When you look at direct traffic and referrers from Australia, the bounce rate is much lower

PS. Do you recommend anyone? I might look into it.

For $139 per month you can get a 60gig transfer VPS, with 14 gig storage.
Virtual Private Servers
This is just one example, there are probably other cheaper ones.

You will find probably half of your bandwidth is chewed up by your chat room.

It is possible to beat spam bots and bogus registration, just run an email validation to activate membership.

@zappa - bots can bypass email validation and captchas now - we find this deters humans more than anything. Google "xrumer", it's our worst nightmare. Forums have to use more advanced bot protection these days, like Akismet, image verification and what not.

Bots cannont bypass email validation ... they cannot log into your email account and click on a link ... they maybe smart, but not that smart ... yet.

The majority of forums on the net operate this way, and the only humans that may be detered are ones who like to set up bogus accounts.