TMF Jeff
TMF owner and co-founder
- Joined
- Apr 2, 2001
- Messages
- 27,128
- Points
- 83
This is a letter that I just sent out to the Archive subscribers. It pretty much speaks for itself in terms of the future of the TMF...
>>>
As most or all of you know, the TMF has been having some serious problems staying up lately. Right now the thinking is that it might be due to the incredible volume of traffic that the Archives has been generating.
In the 10 days of June, the Archive has had 300 gigabytes or more of traffic. The feeling is that so many requests to the processor have caused it to grind to a halt.
However, unfortunately, that is not the worst news. The real bad news is the traffic itself. Even if we moved onto a faster server that could handle such volume of requests, the TMF Archives cannot afford to pay for that bandwidth.
Here's how it breaks down:
The server costs $200 per month now, and in order to handle the volume of traffic we are talking about, we need to upgrade to the $800 per month model with the dual SCSI hard drives and dual processors. At bulk rates for bandwidth, it would be $2 per gig. Over a month we would hit between 1000 and 1500 gigs of bandwidth at the rate we're going. Splitting the difference, lets call it 1250 gigabytes. Times two is $2500, plus the $800 flat rate is a total of $3300 per month to run the Archives.
There are about 400 members in the Archives right now, each paying $5 per month. Of that, ibill keeps about $1. so 400 members times $4 = $1600. You can see how that is not enough to pay for itself.
Therefore I am shutting down the archives, at least temporarily and probably forever. I will cancel all rebillings and will issue refunds to anyone who wants one.
However, I ask that you keep in mind that these refunds are going to come out of my pocket, not from ibill. Therefore I wish to make a counter-offer. Let me double your money in merchandise in the form of a ten dollar coupon, which you can use to buy one of my videos or a magazine from MTJ Publishing (Thanks to Morandilas for helping out!!!)
I realize that thats not the same thing, but I hope you all will understand that the Archive was not a business, and I really put my neck on the chopping block to try to make it work. I deeply regret the loss of it, I felt very strongly that it would be a great long-term benefit to the tickling community.
I especially regret the loss and inconvenience to each of you, and I wish there were some other way to do this. If I let the Archives stay up until the end of the month, I would end up having to pay most of the $2000+ in bandwidth charges out of my own pocket, even assuming that I could get the server to stay up with all this traffic happening..
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN ABOUT THE TMF?
What that means for the TMF is that it is not going to be self-supporting. This in and of itself is not the end of the world. What it means primarily is that we won't be able to host images and video clips anymore on our own machine. Essentially things will go back to being very much the way they were on ezboard, only much much cooler.
>>>
I received an email from someone saying that they had found a password for the Archives on one of those password trading sites. The excess traffic could have been caused by that, but unfortunately the cause doesnt really matter. Theres no way I can risk having that happen again, by whatever means.
I hope this goes to show why password trading is so wrong. It's not just an abstract thing, it can kill websites entirely. We're lucky that there's still going to be a TMF at all.
>>>
As most or all of you know, the TMF has been having some serious problems staying up lately. Right now the thinking is that it might be due to the incredible volume of traffic that the Archives has been generating.
In the 10 days of June, the Archive has had 300 gigabytes or more of traffic. The feeling is that so many requests to the processor have caused it to grind to a halt.
However, unfortunately, that is not the worst news. The real bad news is the traffic itself. Even if we moved onto a faster server that could handle such volume of requests, the TMF Archives cannot afford to pay for that bandwidth.
Here's how it breaks down:
The server costs $200 per month now, and in order to handle the volume of traffic we are talking about, we need to upgrade to the $800 per month model with the dual SCSI hard drives and dual processors. At bulk rates for bandwidth, it would be $2 per gig. Over a month we would hit between 1000 and 1500 gigs of bandwidth at the rate we're going. Splitting the difference, lets call it 1250 gigabytes. Times two is $2500, plus the $800 flat rate is a total of $3300 per month to run the Archives.
There are about 400 members in the Archives right now, each paying $5 per month. Of that, ibill keeps about $1. so 400 members times $4 = $1600. You can see how that is not enough to pay for itself.
Therefore I am shutting down the archives, at least temporarily and probably forever. I will cancel all rebillings and will issue refunds to anyone who wants one.
However, I ask that you keep in mind that these refunds are going to come out of my pocket, not from ibill. Therefore I wish to make a counter-offer. Let me double your money in merchandise in the form of a ten dollar coupon, which you can use to buy one of my videos or a magazine from MTJ Publishing (Thanks to Morandilas for helping out!!!)
I realize that thats not the same thing, but I hope you all will understand that the Archive was not a business, and I really put my neck on the chopping block to try to make it work. I deeply regret the loss of it, I felt very strongly that it would be a great long-term benefit to the tickling community.
I especially regret the loss and inconvenience to each of you, and I wish there were some other way to do this. If I let the Archives stay up until the end of the month, I would end up having to pay most of the $2000+ in bandwidth charges out of my own pocket, even assuming that I could get the server to stay up with all this traffic happening..
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN ABOUT THE TMF?
What that means for the TMF is that it is not going to be self-supporting. This in and of itself is not the end of the world. What it means primarily is that we won't be able to host images and video clips anymore on our own machine. Essentially things will go back to being very much the way they were on ezboard, only much much cooler.
>>>
I received an email from someone saying that they had found a password for the Archives on one of those password trading sites. The excess traffic could have been caused by that, but unfortunately the cause doesnt really matter. Theres no way I can risk having that happen again, by whatever means.
I hope this goes to show why password trading is so wrong. It's not just an abstract thing, it can kill websites entirely. We're lucky that there's still going to be a TMF at all.
