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
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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.
Last edited by fastace77 : 18-04-2008 at 10:37 AM.
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.
@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
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.
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