Today I got a an unexpected charge of 494.96, added to other unexpected charges of 35.00, 46.00, 119.85, and 578.08. This is over a thousand dollars in unexpected and unbudgeted for charges in the past few days. I have called and left a message with the CEO of Digihost, our bandwidth provider, and told him that it is urgent that we need to talk. I simply can't afford these kinds of charges and can't expect the community to keep coming up with this kind of support as they have been doing. I submitted a new plan to them yesterday. Hopefully, we an resolve something today on this.

These charges are related mostly to the heavy volume of traffic on spring.net, childrenstory.com, austen.com and firth.com. All the other websites are minimal compared to these. I will drop childresntory.com today, shut it down. But this in itself still won't be enough.

Terry, I'll do what I can to reduce the bandwidth use at Austen.

That's not the problem, Ann. I've already paid to move the austen site and increase the bandwidth limits. You can alert me if you're approaching these limites via your administrative control panel, if it works. The problem I'm having with the Digi folks is that their monitoring tools don't work, so how can I know when I'm reaching their bandwidth limits.

The way it now works for austen.com is that you'll have 500 mb of disk space and 15 gb of data transfer every month. My overage charges are $1/mb for disk space over this and .08/mb for overage above the bandwidth minimum. You *should* be able to see your bandwidth via your admin page, if you can't please let me know. If you can, and you're getting near the limit, let me know and I'll figure out a way to deal with it. This is much more bandwidth and diskspace than you've ever been allotted for austen.com in the past, I submitted this new plan today so it should go in to effect soon.

Directory Kilobytes Used Percentage HTTP 121,475 47.24% LOGS 134,418 52.27% FTP 554 0.21% MAIL 519 0.2% OTHER 149 0.05% The above are the disk space stats for austen.com. When austen.com was part of the overall plan with all the other sites, this was a big problem. Now that it's on it's own plan, it's only using about half the allotted disk space. But I still an't get any *bandwidth* stats by going to the austen admin page. And that's not fair to us to charge us for more badnwidth when they don't give us the tools to monitor bandwith. The logs can be recycled and archived, but there's no rush on that.

austen.com used 16,476,833 during the last period.

So this is 1.6 gb of bandwidth over the 15 gb allotted and the rate would be .08 over this for the 1,476,833 or whatever that would work out to be.

Ouch!! Anything I should be doing to help?

I've come up with a solution of sorts. I spoke to Ed Newman at Digi on the phone and he did point out the problem is mostly austen.com's bandwidth and the chat room. So he's going to set us up with a dedicated server where we can run our sites with a much higher bandwidth at a (hopefully) reasonable rate of around $200 a month. I'm pushing for 100 gb of data transfer and as much disk space as this server has hard drive space, probably about16 to 30 gb of space. But for this month and next month I'm going to need as much help as you can muster in the austen, drool and spring communities to pay for these overages. I know we just went through a pledge drive but this is another set of hurdles to jump over till we get a new plan in place. So, I encouurage everyone to sign up for PayPal and complete your sign ups if you haven't yet, and keep the checks coming in the mail and the online PayPal payments coming. Maybe we could put a note on austen.com and a pair of Paypal signup and donate links there like we have on spring.net, these could just be copied and pasted there. This has been a day of decision and negotiation and I think we're getting close to a solution. I appreciate everyone's help on this!

There is no chat room. What are they talking about?

ok, i'm confused. (surprised?) anyway, if we are not supposed to have lots of hits, then we can only limit the spring to us and no outsiders. and does the bandwidth thing also count the same user visiting several times a day? so, digihost isn't large enough to handle our business not to mention other websites they service. what if we had our very own servers? i know a guy here who runs his own internet server from his house and works full time outside the home. these may seem like silly questions, but how much is really involved in something like this, aside from the initial expense? and if it helps, you want me to take my website down? (i still have my geo account up and running)

Karen's right. As far as I know, there IS no chat room and hasn't been once for ages! They shut it down shortly after it went online, over a year ago now. I have moved one of my main bulletin boards off of Austen.com, so that should reduce traffic conciderably (perhaps as much as 25% of Austen traffic). Terry, What do you want me to do about montitoring the bandwidth? or swapping logs? I've never done much of that. (I think I've looked at the bandwidth page and didn't get it to show me any results.) And I don't even know where the logs are. ------ Also, could you explain PayPal to me one more time (Karen's tried a couple of times.) If someone just registers with the place, through the link you gave me a while ago, you get 5 bucks? They don't actually have to buy anything? THis is the include you gave me, does this one do it? (with "{" instead of "<"): {!-- Begin PayPal Logo --} {!-- {A HREF="https://secure.paypal.com/xclick/business=terry%40spring.net&item_name=Years+Membership+in+Spring.net&item_number=1&amount=25.00&no_intl=1&return=http%3A//www.spring.net/paypal" target="_blank"}{IMG SRC="http://images.paypal.com/images/x-click-but7.gif" BORDER="0" width=72 height=29 ALT="Make payments with PayPal - it's fast, free and secure!"}{/A} --} {!-- End PayPal Logo --}

LOGS 134,418 52.27% } YIKES!!! Can't we zap those or something? It's a bit rediculous that that log is taking up more than half of the space!

Gee, according to the austen.com admin page, we've used a whopping 1KB of bandwidth so far this month. Yeah, right!

Re: PayPal They can't just register; they have to complete the whole process, which involves (1) giving them your bank account number and then (2) reporting back to PayPal the two piddly little deposits they will make into them. Verification is necessary in order for Spring to receive the signup bonus. And, yes, the people don't have to actually transfer money. All they have to do is set up an account and verify it.

Bank account #, or credit card #, or both?

I used a check debit Visa card for mine. Karen, did you ever get my $5 ? I know they were giving you a hard time about it!!!

Terry, did DigiHost change their billing practices? or was their a sudden jump in bandwidth use on the sites? (Looking over traffic on Austen, I wouldn't think the bandwidth would have gone up by much--except I've been trying to remove a lot of files and needed to download them first, as much as 100 MB worth. I should pretty much be done with that for now.)

Both, Ann. For the last seven months or more I've been able to talk them out of excessive charges. Kat had pretty much been in charge during this time and I could talk to their CEO pretty freely and get things done. They were very understanding and agreeable during this time. That changed in December, I was told that the "CEO was no longer dealing with the day to day affairs of the business" and that badnwidth charges and disk charges were to be strictly applied. And I could no longer retroactively "stack" my plans to avoid excessive charges. On their side, Ed Newman, the Day to Day Operations Manager realized that they were losing money as a business and they had to act fast to bill their customers for every penny they could. This was great for Digihost. But for us it has been like Pearl Harbor Day. It came swiftly and uncompassionately. They aren't cutting even an inch of slack to their customers where before they would bend over backwards to help us. And my numerous calls and emails to the CEO, David Geier, have been unanswered. He is now barricaded by a jealous front line that denies access to him. I feel like Kat likes her customers and wants to help them like she always has, but her hands are tied by middle management. Ed Newman has become the "enforcer" and I have no idea how upper management feels about this, as they are shielded from us. They are blaming the austen chat room for the bamdwidth and I am trying to head off another set of high charges next month. (continued)

The biggest problem, as I have stated, is that their bandwidth measuring tools simply aren't working and, as Ed Newman say, "they're working on fixing it". And he says to call them to get them to generate this information. The problem for me is that I work during the day when they're open and I can't really spend a lot of time with them on the phone having them manually extract this information and they don't respond to emails very well. But that's our only option right now. Ann, feel free to call them on the 800 number if you want to monitor this while they get their act together. With your permission, I will designate you as the official ambassador and contact person for austen.com.

There is a possible cure for all this. At one time this whole system ran off dedicated servers. Three or four in fact. These were machines which I built and maintained. The problem was maintaining them because they were old 486 boxes with very little disk spaces. But I scratched and clawed my way along and kept them running for years. Now we're in a new era where machines our much faster, disks are cheap and it's possible to have low cost on site maintenance on hosting company built systems. So Ed Newman is devisiing a plan where we can put all our websites on a single server with much higher bandwidth and which we would have total control. It would be system admin work but we would be masters of our own destiny. But we would have to fix things that broke more often ourselves. We're talking all this over now. And I'm trying to come up with the best solution to keep all these communities growing and to make it possible to grow more communities of interest in the future. It would help if more folks entered in to this dialog with their thoughts and ideas.

I'm in the chat room now and I see that it's not even running on austen.com, what date was it moved to the other site?

The chatroom on austen.com was closed down by Digihost a long long time ago. They were using other chatrooms at Bravenet and Earthlink and many places, before this one was set up very recently. Ann could probably give you an exact date, but the austen.com chatroom has been shut down for over a year because as Digihost said, "it was illegal." (Ann) Bank account #, or credit card #, or both? Bank account # (A person can send money to anyone by charging it to a credit card, but that does not mean they have set up an account at PayPal.) (Marcia) did you ever get my $5 ? No. They said their rules changed (on whatever date) so that personal accounts didn't get the referral bonus. Because your registration wasn't completed by then, I wasn't going to get it.

...and Ann, you might want to delete all the posts about the person who used someone else's name. All that venting. Must have given the troll a chuckle.

I guess the $5 referral bonus *was* too good to be true. I wonder if that applies to the spring's $5 referral bonus as well? I'll have to check on this. It sounds like I still need to at least try and talk to the CEO if the chat room has been closed. I wonder how much bandwidth a chatroom uses and what it cost to run it on one of these other chatroom providers? Are they free?

Ooops, slippage with KarenR.

I guess the $5 referral bonus *was* too good to be true. Terry, if you have set up a business account, then you get the signup bonuses. The Austen.com community did not like those other chatroom providers, which is why this new one has been set up by one of their community participants. He is footing the bill. My guess is that Digihost is calling the Tea Room (which Ann just moved off of austen.com yesterday) or what resided at: http://www.austen.com/babble/bindex.cgi the chatroom. It gets a lot of action, but is only a message board. With all these components of austen.com being moved to other host sites, what is the point to having any of it there? If they leave, you lose THE major source of ongoing funding.

That's the point. And I'm working on solving that by moving to a dedicated host where we can have everything on the same server. I have already upgraded our plan for more bandwidth and disk space and am negotiating for a dedicated server. I have set up a PayPal business account, so I am getting these bonuses. I'll check the PayPal log to make sure.

Whoa!! So does this mean that you'll have to do all the sys adm work, Terry? If the server goes down, so do all of us and we'd have to rely on you to bring it back up? In addition, Digihost would do normal, ongoing maintenance and perform upgrades to its own servers. Who is going to do that for this dedicated server? Let's not be rash here.

I think we're moving toward a hybrid plan where they do some of the stuff and I have ability to do sysadmin work also. They would maintain the server. We won't go ahead with this without a great deal of thought and dicussion rigthfirsfirst away and we'll see how that works out first. I promise not make any rash moves!

As a member at large, may I say that I have been v. satisfied with Digihost service. I hope you can get the financial admin stuff ironed out, and keep them on the technical side.

Very shortly after moving to DigiHost (like within a month), they shut our chat room down, kaput, finito. We spent about a year on commercial chat services (ATT, Bravenet, etc.) trying to find a new home, before a philanthropic fellow on our site set up one for us. (It's with the hosting company http://readyhosting.com , which you might want to look at: $99/year + unlimited bandwidth + 500MB space + they pay for domain registration (usually a $35/year cost). They have a $50 first time set up fee, which might be waved for domain transfers.) ------ Karen might be right that they are referring to "The Tea Room", which is a CGI bulletin board, not a chat room, http://www.TheDWG.com/babble/bindex.cgi . This was running on the Austen.com servers until yesterday, when I moved it to my www.TheDWG.com account, also with ReadyHosting. This leaves the DWG board as the main drag from Austen.com on the Spring servers (we have 3 other boards which get small to minimal traffic). I think the Tea Room Board gets a bit less usage than the DWG board, but without tracking and monitoring abilities, I have no way of knowing for certain! Either way, having the Tea Room and the DWG on different servers with different hosting companies should be beneficial for the Spring. ---------- With all these components of austen.com being moved to other host sites, what is the point to having any of it there? So far I've only moved some of the older stories in the archives (about 100 MB worth--it's a big archives, well over 1,000 stories--though not all of that has been deleted from Austen.com yet) and I've moved one of the two large message boards. I do kind of like the idea of splitting the site between two hosting companies. It seems to me like insurance, in case one of them goes down or belly-up. We've always maintained an emergency board at InsideTheWeb for that purpose. Also, by splitting the site up, we will lessen the strain on any one computer or host. It will cost me only $99/year to run www.TheDWG.com, and after the first two years, that will include the $35 domain registration fee (for a net of $64/year.) That's a great price and I figured it was worth it. ------ With your permission, I will designate you as the official ambassador and contact person for austen.com. I might contact them to find out what is going on, but I don't know if I want to be an official contact. For one thing, I only have one phone line which is tied up with my computer most of the day. For another thing, I hate telephones and loathe making calls--to the point where I procrastinate until there is no point in calling at all. (I was never the stereotypical teenage girl who hung on the phone for hours. Yick!) I'm a bad person to delegate the phone work to.

I don't want you to be a phone jockey, Ann, I just wanted to have it so you could talk to our hosts when you need to. With the move to the new Plan, disk space should not be a problem. And I can negotiate more bandwidth. I'd like to compare what we're getting now with austen.com with what we could get with another host, especially one that doesn't charge for extra bandwidth. I'll take a look at readyhosting today.

Readyhosting, it turns out, is Windows 2000 hosting. It might be tough to run some scripts and software.

Here are some other options I'm looking at, if anyone else wants to review these and give me their opinions, I'd love more input. http://webservices.cnet.com/html/aisles/Most_Popular_-_Dedicated_Servers.asp

Terry, can you get a hold of any bandwidth data for Austen over the last week or two? I've been wondering how much the drop has been since I moved part of the site to a different ISP on the 12th.

I'll see what I can dig up. Of course now austen.com has expanded limites on badnwidth and disk space since I "upgraded" our plan.

HTTP 1/01 - 1/26: 0 KB 30 Day Total: 1,041,607 KB FTP 1/01 - 1/26: 0 KB 30 Day Total: 807 KB POP-3 1/01 - 1/26: 0 KB 30 Day Total: 1,767 KB SMTP 1/01 - 1/26: 0 KB 30 Day Total: 0 KB TELNET 1/01 - 1/26: 0 KB 30 Day Total: 0 KB OTHER 1/01 - 1/26: 0 KB 30 Day Total: 295 KB We're no where near our limit of 15 gbs!

Successful requests: 40,082 Average successful requests per day: 40,108 Successful requests for pages: 4,684 Average successful requests for pages per day: 4,686 Failed requests: 503 Redirected requests: 79 Distinct files requested: 1,536 Corrupt logfile lines: 1 Data transferred: 368,324 kbytes Average data transferred per day: 368,580 kbytes More austen.com stats.

Directory Kilobytes Used Percentage HTTP 129,412 47.34% LOGS 141,466 51.75% FTP 554 0.2% MAIL 1,760 0.64% OTHER 168 0.06% Space Kilobytes Percentage USED 273,360 54.67% FREE 226,640 45.32% TOTAL 500,000 100%

Really, no worries about bandwidth and diskspace now, last month was the killer for me financially and I'm still trying to recover.

Looks like the move of one of our boards cut bandwidth by 400-500MB. Good :)

Having Webtrends on both spring.net and austen.com will give us a much better handle on our bandwidth and visitor trends. And it's open to anyone. http://www.spring.net/_webtrends http://www.austen.com/_webtrends

It's slightly worrying that the top hit for the entire site is 404 NOT FOUND http://spring.net/404.html don't you think? :-)

That's because we have so many broken links, and I intend to fix them sometime when I have a lot of time. I'm researching link reporting tools that are better than the one offered by Frontpage.

anything I can help with, let me know. I have a DSL line at home now so access is much easier.

Hey that's great, you can help me fix broken links if you want (heh heh!)

sure thing. how do you want them fixed?

Mike, here's what you need to download: http://home.snafu.de/tilman/XENU.ZIP Xenu's Link Sleuth (TM) Here's what it does: Xenu's Link Sleuth (TM) does not have the graphic capabilities of WebAnalyzer 2.0 ("Wavefront view"). But here are some of the advantages of Xenu's Link Sleuth (TM): It is free Simple user-interface Better error reports (not just "network error") "Save" works also while the software is busy The "broken links view" shows only broken links; In WebAnalyzer you'd have to press the button again and again as the window fills with crap. While Xenu does not offer an "update" facility (which doesn't work anyway), it has a "recheck broken links" function that works fine. It is small, written by one person with 5 years experience of Windows development and 15 years of professional experience as software developer. This means that bugs will be corrected quickly. This is a matter of honour. The report can be viewed easily, even when you have long URLs. Uses much less disk space for intermediate files, executable file much smaller Loading of saved files much faster (WebAnalyzer loses time by displaying the extra graphics) Supports SSL websites ("https:// ") Partial testing of ftp and gopher sites Special handling of redirected URLs Site Map Randomization of checking order, means less concurrent requests on a single server The bottom line is that it will point out all our broken links. Once you've ran Xenu, then I'll set you up with authorship privileges. Email me for the details on this (terry@spring.net).

running it now...the links to Visto on the main page are broken. i bet that's contributing massively to the 404 count :-)

Terry, The last time I ran Xenu it worked fine but I didn't have enough hours (!!!) left to let it finish before I had to go to sleep. Now when I run it, it doesn't seem able to find my network connection. A few other pieces of software (Outlook Express, RealPlayer, Yahoo! messenger) seem to be exhibiting this behaviour too. I am trying to work on fixing the problem but don't really know where to start. I'll let you know if I get it working!

Cool, thanks for giving it a run, Mike.

Has anyone else noticed that the new server seems to be rather slow??? I've been noticing that slowness particularly when I'm FTPing things. This has been going on for several days.

I have decided not to use Xenu, Terry, for this reason. It logs into the spring under my username and then proceeds to follow every single link that I can see. I logged in on Thursday to discover about five conferences missing from my conference list and a whole load of new ones added...you can see what it's done if you think about it! The thing I'm worried about is that I have kill permissions in a couple of confs (babes and business) and I would prefer not to wipe out entire conferences just to check whether there are any broken links in there!!!!! Do you have any ideas?

Mike, the link to Visto on Drool's main page is probably generating a ton of those "can't find" messages. Can you delete that without killing permissions or wiping out the conference? If not, leave as is. Thanks. K

Yeah, there are several links to Visto around the place. I would say that they are generating at least 80-90% of the 404 hits :-) I don't yet have any kind of write permissions to the servers...Terry, am I going to clean these up or would you prefer to do it?

We need to get rid of them, go ahead and replace them all with Paypal banners. We're going to set up a Paypal shop soon.

I don't have any kind of access or write permissions yet, Terry :-)

I'll set up an ftp account for you and a FP2000 account if you need it.

just an ftp will be fine. I don't use FrontPage.

OK email me.

Done! Welcome Mike to our web authoring community.

got 'em, thanks :) Won't be able to do anything until next week...got a busy weekend of visiting mom!

Say hi to mom.

Terry, can you log into Spring using Frontpage? If you can, then you should be able to swap the visto banners on the front part of the site easily (I don't know about the conferences). I remember I created that as an include. You should be able to log on through FrontPage, pull up the include page, and change it. It should change it everywhere that include appears. If you need help doing this, let me know. It should be very easy.

But just make sure it doesn't affect my Bucket pages, with some global replacement stuff...especially since I'll be away for a few days and can't fix things while gone.

OK, we'll be careful. Are you going to do any mods on spring.net, if you do I'd like to make that search feature a small text only box that fits in better with the whole page. I'm also looking for ways to get the page to load faster.

I don't think I have the passwords anymore. If you want me to look at things, e-mail me with them (FrontPage ones.) Karen, changing the includes shouldn't touch your pages. It's not a global replace at all, it's just altering one of the pieces that make up the front pages.

Email me Ann, and I'll reply with the information you need. Or email me your phone number if you like and I'll call. I don't know if the phone number I have in my Palm is the right one.

I set you up, but I get an answering machine at the number where I try to reach you. It's in the 612 area code?

Check your ann@austen.com mailbox. Let me know whatever you need, I would appreciate your help on changing the include so it's the PayPal logo we have on our main page instead of Visto.

I got the e-mail. I think I know what the problem with file size is. For some reason, that MSTheme thing that I took out when I redesigned the site is back in there. It takes up a lot of space.

Voila, the Visto banners at the top of the pages should all now be PayPal. FYI, it is really, really easy to swap those in and out. Just: Log into the site through FrontPage. (it must be through front page, the change won't be made everywhere, if you do not.) Open up index.html Right click on the Banner Select "Open include page /_private/Banner-adTop.htm" (or whatever it's called) Make the changes Save the file and close it. That should change it everywhere it occurs.

BTW, I didn't touch the banners on the conferences. They seem to still be Visto. I have no clue how to change those and wouldn't want to try. I just did the pages you get when you click on the www.spring.net page and all the branches from there.

That Search feature on the front page was remarkably stubborn when it came to tweaking. I think I cleaned it up a bit, though :)

We've had a wonderful response to our current Pledge Drive and have received way over a dozen contributions. Thanks to everyone. I got a substantial bundle of checks sent in by Ann and quite a few Paypal contributions. And I've noticed a lot of new contributors. This really keeps us alive and growing!

Anyone who needs access to the conferences can do so by using SecureCRT or another ssh client. That's how I'm posting. Email me for specific instructions and I'll get you running on this. If you already have a shell account  it's a pretty easy step.