Back on April 15th, I pulled the plug on StreamingRadioGuide to coincide with the release of the film version of the first (and final?) portion of Atlas Shrugged.
Part of the reason was I could no longer justify the costs of renting the web server. It is not a business (and will NOT become one). The approximately $450 a month was far more than the psychic benefits of running the service.
If you’ve followed the blog, I’ve mentioned over the past month that I’ve purchased a $400 eMachine and have it hanging from a uVerse connection. It’s been running in that configuration for about 3 weeks.
There were a couple blips, mostly due to my inexperience, but I’ve decided it is working well enough to “pull the plug” on my server contract at the high quality web hosting facility.
What that means is there is no redundancy – if my house burns down, the power goes out, uVerse goes down, etc… – the server might go down without warning, and may not come back up quickly if at all. If that seems to happen, keep an eye on the weather in Connecticut. If there is a hurricane (like Irene), the server could be down for an extended time.
What I did following April 15th was to strongly encourage people to at least save off static copies of the web pages (with tracking disabled) so that you would have something – but the reality is that almost every radio station now streams, so finding a station streaming Mark Levin doesn’t really require this directory any more.
So without the costs of the server, my anxiety level is much lower (given the current economic environment).
The web site is not for sale, I’m not looking for “partners”. The web site has a purpose, and offers of help always carry strings. I don’t like strings. The server will keep running, but if it doesn’t – it isn’t the end of the world.
That’s pretty wild Art. We used to to stuff like that at work all the time. See what we could run on a server with no degradation of performance.
Then we were bought by one of the big DOW companies and they have run our company into the ground, over the process of 10 years. There is only like 4 or 5 of us left, and they closed our office. We had to move to one of ‘their’ offices or be right sized.
None of that innovative thinking anymore, just a paycheck now. I hate to have to go to work this morning. I guess I could just start eating my Glenn Beck food stores, that I have been accumulating since 08? They already took my 401k away, again.
I really wish I didn’t have to go to work today.
Thanks, Art. If it goes down it wouldn’t be the end of the world but a fun piece would be gone – plus where would I go for your commentary? I’ve had 6 days off in 3 years – going to head over to Bryson City for a few days – got a friend at the Cherokee Reservation I haven’t seen in a while. One of my ‘go to’ spots if the SHTF.
Good deal Art. Put that $450 per month towards something useful!
What you’ve done is simply revert back to the first generation of the internet design where websites were hosted on connected user machines. That was before business decided there might be a market for big servers renting space and charging by the byte (Compuserve model).
The main limitation on hosting a site at home is not so much reliability. It’s that your upload bandwidth becomes the download bandwidth for the users. So if you have a high traffic site or webpages with lots of graphics or streaming video, the asymmetric fast download/slow upload speed model offered by most ISPs doesn’t work well for web hosting. To solve that problem you start considering T1 lines, and then after doing cost comparisons you end up right back where you started with contracted hosting.
Not so much any more. My uVerse connection is 1.5 Mb/sec upstream. That’s the highest bit rate for a self install – it’s about a T1 for the price of an ADSL connection. They’re hoping I’ll want to get TV from them some day. If I wanted a pro install, which means running cat5 cable about 2 feet, then much higher bit rates are possible. The hosting service was not speed limited, but roughly at 1 Mb/sec if it was continual use.
UVerse is limited to 200 or 300 GB of usage a month, depending on the plan. You would have to be running p2p file sharing of videos to approach that number.
I realized after I typed that message that for the past few weeks the server has been configured backward – pulling data from Chicago. Fixing that dropped page times from 4000 ms to 500…. So it should be faster than it has been.
I’ve noticed a little slowdown during peak times, but it’s still all relative.
Back around 2000ish, I remember having a conversation with my boss at NASDAQ how very shortly ordinary people were going to be getting t1ish speeds in their house for about what they were paying for dialup – and how that was going to change everything about stock trading – former traders who know the ropes would be able to trade from home on close to equal terms against their former employers.
I appreciate your continued service with this website. While you can find a specific show at a station’s website; through SRG, the process is much easier and streamlined especially if you are trying to find a show that is on tape.
Tape? What’s that?