Okay, looooooooong post...
Not sure if you are looking for ideas for new hosting...
Thanks for the suggestions. Unfortunately in some ways, we have learned the hard way that we have to be really careful about the host service we use, because the databases are quite large, and there are some specific requirements that have to be met in order to run a PSP service effectively. For most 'normal' hosting services, this means that we have to buy into the relatively expensive packages, even though we don't use all of the facilities. And then we run into the problems that the host doesn't tell you about in their llist of wonderful features - like how they are going to behave when several searches at the same time appear to eat up their shared processor cycles in huge numbers.
To your average user this doesn't show, and for quite a lot of the time it's not a problem. The trouble is that at any given time you can potentially end up with a large number of guests searching the site, and I think that this is when things sometimes get a bit sticky as far as the host goes - we are victims of our own, pretty much invisible to the end user, popularity.
If you want some sort of idea of the potential magnitude of the problem, you should look at the
Music Software Internet Popularity site - Audition/CEP is consistently ranked as the 3rd most popular search. And if you look at the 'products in transition' page linked to it, you will find that there is still a pretty equal split between AA and CEP - which is why our archive still gets a lot of hits, this being the only large repository of CEP information on the net at all. I think that AudioMasters and Adobe themselves get the lion's share of all of the search hits, one way or another, and this may well be at the root of our hosting problems.
Assuming that there's a germ of truth in all this, it raises some interesting questions, of course... One thing we have tried to do is to get Google to index the site, and then let people use their dedicated search engine instead of ours. But this is not without its problems either - incidentally not helped in the slightest by the host forcing even temporary path changes upon us. And when people realise that the site is here with its own search engine, they stop using the Google search anyway, and we are back to square one.
Ideally we need to use a dedicated server - but this is not a cheap option, and I don't really see why a few subscribers should prop up the rest of the non-contributing internet users. One potential way of paying for this is for the site to take advertising, of course, but we really don't want to go down this route. Another way is to force people to pay a small subscription in order to join, and this idea has some appeal as far as I'm concerned, although it also goes somewhat against the grain as far as the original concept of the site goes. I suppose that one option is to restrict guest users to manually poking about in the site, and not using the search engine and this, combined with a small subscription, might resolve a few issues - but I really can't tell without performing some sort of experiment, ideally, or at least taking a poll of existing users (which automatically excludes the people I really want to ask, so it isn't
really a good way to find out). I suspect that the whole thing wouldn't be very popular though - people
expect all this stuff to be free at source, unfortunately.
I should say that whilst I have absolutely no objection at all to outlining any of this publically, you have to bear in mind that most of the options have been discussed at some length by the management before, and it's unlikely that options that we haven't in some way considered already in one form or another would come forward. I'd be quite interested to hear what others think about subscription possibilities, though, because if there was a will, and enough cash donations to pay for a dedicated server, that's what I'd personally go for. To do it at all would require approximately 3 times the amount we generally get from a subscription drive now.
The current financial situation, incidentally, is that we presently have enough money in the coffers to pay for another year (Feb to Feb) of hosting at the same level we have now. And the domains are paid for for another year and a half, up to July 2008.
Comments are of course welcome...
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