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GameDev.net has the most down time of any site I regularly visit.

GDNet Comments, Suggestions, and Ideas Community

Started by JackOfAllTrades January 07, 2012 09:15 AM

60 comments, last by jjd 12 years, 3 months ago

tstrimp

1,798

January 08, 2012 08:32 PM

Point is, it takes money to run a quality site. If you aren't giving them money you don't have much room to complain.

That's not true at all. Unpaid users make up the backbone of the community and if all of them disappeared the paid members alone would not make a viable website. Next time you're browsing the forums, try ignoring all the posts that were not started by an unpaid user and all the responses that were not made by a free user. You just lost practically all your content.

Edit: Not saying I'm a valuable member of the community who contributes to the site. I'm just an old lounge troll, so you're probably right, MY opinion doesn't matter

JackOfAllTrades

109

Author

January 08, 2012 09:56 PM

please occasionally click through an add or two. You don't have to look at it, just click through it. Make it a personal quota "I'll follow 3 adds per day to support the site" or something.

This post is strictly against adsense policies and can result in termination of GDNet's ad sense account. I know you are trying to help but this will likely cause more harm than good.

Want an easy to use open source 3D video game SDK that handles Physics, Graphics, Audio, and AI right out of the box?

way2lazy2care

793

January 08, 2012 10:56 PM

Could GD perhaps generate more content that players as well as developers would be interested in like developer interviews etc? That might be a good way to get some more cash coming in.

I always thought it would be cool to have more interviews about developers than interviews about developers' products; more about what they do/who they are than what they're making.

i dunno. just shooting that out there.

JackOfAllTrades

109

Author

January 09, 2012 01:19 AM

Do we give off an impression that we are rolling in money here or somethin? =) Almost all of our ads are generic, amazon sales are poor (not to mention their affiliate program has paid less and less each year that they develop 'exciting new payment tiers' , so we depend a lot on gdnet+ subscriptions. This site is a labor of love.

Over the last year we've had to learn how to work in a way we hadn't before.. depending on a lot of open source software and moving to MUCH cheaper cloud hosting. But with so many changes it was a first for us, but it was our only option if we wanted to be able to afford to keep running the site. Prior to 2011 we had our own rack, our own servers running Windows server operating systems.. we go from that software to a LAMP stack for the first time in our existence. 2011 I feel in some ways for us was an adapt or die year.. for real.

To be fair, I made an upgrade a few months ago that has left us with next to zero downtime since then.. this one hit us out of the blue like a nuclear bomb. Our provider actually corrupted our file system by running fsck on the parent server we are on without backing us up first. Their response? "We're sorry.. " followed by our options.

I fully expect, barring some fluke like yesterday morning, to have next to no downtime in the forseeable future with this setup however. Though what we do when our provider literally destroys us.. I don't know. It wasn't intentional, but wow. I really thought we would be good.

So I've been thinking a great deal on this and thought of an awesome solution! Why doesn't GDNet move to richer forms of content like video tutorials? Imagine something like Machinima where game developers create tutorials and submit them for review. If the video is of sufficient quality it will be uploaded to the official GDNet YouTube channel.

A large portion of the wanna be indie game developers consist of 12 year old children who are too impatient to read a tutorial or search through forum posts. Looking at the success of GyroVorbis whose community largely consisted of the same people that visit this site. I'm guessing this idea has a very high chance for at least moderate success if a tab for videos is added and you advertised the youtube channel on here much like you have been doing the market place. If gamedev.net implements this, I promise to submit a few tutorials myself.

Want an easy to use open source 3D video game SDK that handles Physics, Graphics, Audio, and AI right out of the box?

ranakor

439

January 09, 2012 03:57 AM

I often see issues about "costs" on website and i'm wondering, where the hell are those costs?
I can't see a small (i know you get a lot of traffic, but none of the features feel cpu/mem intensive) website like gamedev needing anything more than a single dedicated server at around 150€/month, it can't be that hard to reach that much and should be more than silky smooth, all the time, always, and never down.
The only reasonable reason for a full website downtime is "the datacenter had a major issue and is down", which pretty much never happens.
PS the prices i see over here seem totally crappy, 7.5GB ram & 2 cores for 250 a month is silly, take a look at http://www.ovh.com/fr/serveurs_dedies/eg_ssd.xml , only 110€/month, 4 cores +HT 24gigs of ram 2X 120GO SSD, this is 10 times what is required to run a well programmed website like gamedev.

Come fight my brute... if you DARE!!

Mussi

4,453

January 09, 2012 08:31 AM

I often see issues about "costs" on website and i'm wondering, where the hell are those costs?
I can't see a small (i know you get a lot of traffic, but none of the features feel cpu/mem intensive) website like gamedev needing anything more than a single dedicated server at around 150€/month, it can't be that hard to reach that much and should be more than silky smooth, all the time, always, and never down.
The only reasonable reason for a full website downtime is "the datacenter had a major issue and is down", which pretty much never happens.
PS the prices i see over here seem totally crappy, 7.5GB ram & 2 cores for 250 a month is silly, take a look at http://www.ovh.com/f...dies/eg_ssd.xml , only 110€/month, 4 cores +HT 24gigs of ram 2X 120GO SSD, this is 10 times what is required to run a well programmed website like gamedev.

What do the back-up services cost? Most of what I've seen cost more than the server does.

samoth

9,833

January 09, 2012 11:16 AM

I often see issues about "costs" on website and i'm wondering, where the hell are those costs?
I can't see a small (i know you get a lot of traffic, but none of the features feel cpu/mem intensive) website like gamedev needing anything more than a single dedicated server at around 150€/month
...
OVH

Admittedly, although OVH is the most unreliable hoster I've ever seen, I've asked myself that question many times. You do get a ridiculously overpowered dedicated server (between 8 and 24 cores, 12+ GB of RAM, and upwards of 2TB disk, sometimes with SSD too) with 15 TB of traffic inclusive for 150-180 euros at other providers, though.

You usually get a smaller packet at the same provider for between 50 and 100. Only 4-8GB of RAM, only dual-core, no fancy RAID and no two-digit terabytes of external traffic of course, but hey... for a machine doing nothing but storing backups, that should be ok. How many cores do you need to write a dump to disk?

What do the back-up services cost? Most of what I've seen cost more than the server does.[/quote]
But, what's that back-up service worth if it fails the first time it's needed? Running a cron job every hour and sending a tar file to a ftp server would have been better.

I mean, seriously... those 32 lines full of customer support shit of what went wrong and maybe went wrong and why the data was lost really doesn't make up for the fact that whatever the provider did was total fail. What does it help you if someone tells you they had a good reason for this and that, and Rob did this and whatnot.

The facts are simple: Your service is interrupted for noticeable time. Your data is gone. You paid for backup, and you get an email.

way2lazy2care

793

January 09, 2012 01:31 PM

I often see issues about "costs" on website and i'm wondering, where the hell are those costs?
I can't see a small (i know you get a lot of traffic, but none of the features feel cpu/mem intensive) website like gamedev needing anything more than a single dedicated server at around 150€/month, it can't be that hard to reach that much and should be more than silky smooth, all the time, always, and never down.
The only reasonable reason for a full website downtime is "the datacenter had a major issue and is down", which pretty much never happens.
PS the prices i see over here seem totally crappy, 7.5GB ram & 2 cores for 250 a month is silly, take a look at http://www.ovh.com/f...dies/eg_ssd.xml , only 110€/month, 4 cores +HT 24gigs of ram 2X 120GO SSD, this is 10 times what is required to run a well programmed website like gamedev.

Just one thing that bugs me about this assessment. $250 =/= €250. $250 = ~€320. 25% decrease in price from not converting currency is non-trivial.

Gaiiden

5,720

January 09, 2012 03:32 PM

Hi guys. First off, thanks for the continued support (specially new GDNet+ members like Alpha). Second, while yes at times it can be a bit initially demoralizing to see threads like this pop up ultimately it serves to remind us of how things look from your end and helps keep us motivated to provide better services for you all to take advantage of. So certainly don't stop giving us grief I just ask that you continue to do so in as civil a manner as I see here.

Third is that don't be annoyed if we stop responding here on your discussions regarding site operations. There's only so much we can publicly disclose on this kind of stuff. I don't want you to think we've stopped paying attention though ;)

Drew Sikora
Executive Producer
GameDev.net

The_Neverending_Loop

635

January 09, 2012 04:01 PM

I say we have a gamedev car wash to raise funds! or maybe a bake sale! those ideas are sure to raise millions!

GameDev.net has the most down time of any site I regularly visit.

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