GIMME DAT KERCHING!

I am struggling. I have to pay for renovations to my house, but no Araldite! If you're an AGB tragic, please consider chipping in a few dollars or I will continue to blog. Click here to find out more. Donors: Not even one, you tight-arses. Known Raised: $Rock.All Still at the minimum, see, but every extra cent helps me get nicer stuff -- a can of leak-sealer spray, one of those bathroom lights that gets hot, and because I'm a wanker, a basin that sits on the bench. So please donate!

Comments

[boynton]

I think you should raise the bar on Vanities">http://metriconhomes.com.au/corp/mediacentre/press_releases/pr_1_03_06.asp">Vanities and go for a Double, so that's two Above-Counter (hip to be) Square Basins while you're at it.

[Tony T.]

As the philosopher Lennon once wrote on Double Vanity: "Clean up Time, hey, clean up time, well, well, yeah, clean up time."

[Patrick]

Hmmm, why is Troppo on a VPS? It don't seem to me that they need one.

Never mind. I thought I might chuck you a few mil*, being that I am all wealthy an shit myself, but alas you leave no donation link/button in this post.

*Offer runs out in .025 seconds.

[hungbunny]

What's that stupid little chair for in the basin picture? Is it a wanking stool?

[Tony T.]

P: What is VPS? If it means Very Pucked Server then that is appropriate because, whaddaya know, Troppo's down again.

H: It's not so much a wanking stool, as a stool for wankers to sit on.

[Yobbo]

Troppo are fucked in the head. Every other blog in the world manages to get by fine without dedicated server hosting. It's not like they are getting more hits than Instapundit. But their unique problems somehow require thousands of dollars to fix.

[Tony T.]

I can't see why they don't come to TypePad.

TP gives plenty of bandwidth, costs 203.131 AUD a year, loads quick, has heaps of options, is easy to use, has excellent tech support and excluding one stuff-up in 2005 and planned maintenance of which you get detailed notice, has been down for a total of about one day in three years.

To me and my limited technical knowledge, the way Troppo are going about it seems like madness.

[Patrick]

Hi Tony!

VPS is a virtual private server.

It's almost the same as having your own whole server. I might be wrong, but I think VPS's usually have only 4 other people (could be six, I am not sure) sharing them.

They are a good option for huge volume traffic sites, like maybe a torrent exchange site. It seems to me to be total over kill to have one for a single blog.

[Patrick]

PS, we run the Ob Deck on a simple shared server. This includes around 20 blogs Plus a couple of play sites for me and Kati. The traffic varies a lot between the blogs, but over the whole site we get quite a lot of traffic and have very few access issues. This costs us the grand sum of around 200 bucks a year (depends on the exchange rate).

On the surface without pretending to know whats going on at Troppo, it seems like madness for them to spend so much for so little.

[Tony T.]

Thanks, Patrick.

Maybe Troppo are just aiming for insta-numbers, allowing themselves some expansion room. But they seem to often knock themselves out organising server service.

[Nabakov]

I'll chip in for your wine cellar TT. Not like you're gonna do anything else with all that sweet sweet triva night booty.

[Jacques Chester]

I'm the goon who continues to make a mockery of good management over at Club Troppo.

Currently we rent a VPS at a good rate, but essentially we have found that our and most other VPS providers are generous on everything except CPU time. RAM, bandwidth and disk space are no good if your server won't finish generating pages in time.

I've done a lot to speed up Troppo over the past 6 months - it's brutally optimised and cached and has upgraded services three times. The server purchase will be, I hope, "ze final solution" when it comes to server responsiveness and availability in future.

In terms of traffic, it varies. I often watch the raw server logs (yes, I'm a geek) and Troppo is constantly being visited by dozens of search and archival engine robots, on top of human visitors, plus a number of RSS services like netvibe etc. Because we're a long established site with good rankings we also attract a lot of spam zombie traffic. All this comes and goes but on a bad day there'll be several dozen simultaneous requests blasting away on the VPS. Then comes the fact that most plugins have shitty optimisation and insist performing monster cartesian joins on big tables in such a way that MySQL goes to disk, which plays merry hell with load averages.

Now you would be correct in pointing out that dozens of requests per second is a doddle for any machine of recent vintage, and you'd be absolutely right. My own 3-year old Athlon XP server can generate roughly 300x more pages per second than our VPS. But Wordpress and MySQL are not doddles for CPU-limited VPSes, which is too many of them. Easier just to jump up to the top end of what we need.

[SaggyGreen]

That was a lengthy collection of words, aligned together in such a way as to make no sense to me.

[Tony T.]

By the second paragraph I was worrying that I was lost.

By the third I was starting to conserve water.

And by the fourth I'd drawn a giant HELP in the sand.

[Jacques Chester]

And by the 5th?

[Laura]

Blogger is free, and doesn't crash.

Those basins are pretty much the only kind the bathroom place will let you buy. It's a hard world.

[Tony T.]

JC: Cannibalism.

L: TP is free, too, but I've opted for an upgraded package. And the sooner the bathroom places get back to basin basics, the better. I still haven't been able to work out who, precisely, decided the bowl-basin look was a good look.

[Patrick]

It sounds like gibberish to me. The reasons quoted

Troppo is constantly being visited by dozens of search and archival engine robots, on top of human visitors, plus a number of RSS services like netvibe etc. Because we're a long established site with good rankings we also attract a lot of spam zombie traffic.

Can be said of all websites including my own. I see no reason what so ever why they need such "power" to run a blog. Unless of course, they plan to run dozens of them on their VPS.