Package Upgrade

[cmschool]

Thanks Powweb! You never seem to stop giving back to the customer. :)

[Croc Hunter]

Thanks for listening to the little people.

Excellent work :)

[vitriol]

many thanks...very cool
:D

[sandy]

45 GB Monthly data transfer (2 GB/day limit still apply)

Nice upgrade. For most, thje 650 and 45 GB/month is never going to be realizxed. I would have liked to have seen the 2 GBN/day bump just a tad, to allow for that rare occurernce where the daily limit is exceeded. I've come damn close to it, and it only happens on that rare day, where there really is no control by the site owner.

While nice, the additions are merely window dressing for the masses. What we really needed was a new limit of say, 2.25 to 2.5 GB/day. Yes,, we can get 45 GB in a month, but at 2 GB/day, the max is 60 GB in a month,, leaving a margin of 15 GBV..

Help the "few" of us who bump the 2 GB on the rare scenario .. please :)

Sandy

[B&T]

Ya gotta love this place.

Sure we get a few bumps now and then. But I have run large IT installations in my prior life and understand how hard it is to keep all the wheels on - expecially when everyone also demands the latest version of everything so you have to keep changing the config.

You can call it window dressing - more space - users - monthly transfer . . . but I like not having to worry about those kind of limits.

I like the open environment where we can control and manage our own space . . . I like the new higher limits . . . I like the continued improvements I have seen in the 5 months I have been here.

This was the best deal around when I got here . . . it is even better now :)

[sandy]

You can call it window dressing - more space - users - monthly transfer . . . but I like not having to worry about those kind of limits.

Those are limits as well :)

So, why not have less of a limit on the daily transfer volume?

Sandy

[RocketJeff]

Originally posted by sandy
So, why not have less of a limit on the daily transfer volume?
Simple, Most of the others incure a one-time capital expense (disk space, mainly) but increasing the daily cap would incure a on-going expense for more bandwidth from their provider.

They did raise the montly cap, but this probably wouldn't impact the bandwidth cost as much and it allows them to keep customers longer before they outgrow Powweb's services. I assume they did a cost/benifit analysis and determined the best bang for their bucks.

[sandy]

Good point RocketJeff..

To appease some of us who "may" exceed the 2 GB/day limit, let's say once every 6 months to a year, if ever, why not set a policy that a warning be sent,, instead of just turning the site off? I have never exceeded the limit, but I did hit about 1.9+ one day and 1.7 another day. I can assure you that I was watching my transfer up till about 10PM PDT that day, and was prepared to shut down my site, JUST to keep from having powweb killing my site. The auto-killing is just not right .. Have a margin of safety .. keep the limits as they are, but get rid of the auto-killer...

Sandy

[NMS]

Great upgrade...Great Powweb :)

[ShawnC1032]

Well there has to be an increase in the daily transfer limit soon, because another 15GB, and you have to use 2GB day to get what they are giving you. Also an increase in the file limit too, it's pretty hard to use 650MB with pictures and pages.

Personally I believe that the transfer limit should be about 3-4GB because a site could use 4GBs one day and less than a 1GB the next. So unless you average 1.5GB exactly you aren't going to use it. Even then, thats a very small margin before they automaticlly turn off their site.

[Pauly]

Hey All & Powweb,

WOW!!!, Thanks for the Upgrade!!!

I just had a co-worker sign-up for a powweb package


(in the voice and style of James T. Kirk)......must.........inform........ them.........of.........the..........upgrade...... ....before its too late!

lol :)

Pauly
www.dropthedrum.com

[barrikady]

PowWeb Rocks!

Barrikady

[B&T]

hmmm . . . good point about the number of files . . . it would be hard to get to 500mb let alone the 650mb with the current file limits.

maybe they know that all too well so they can advertise how ever much space you want - the file limit is not advertised, it is in the finer print.

but . . . still . . . this place is a great deal.

[RocketJeff]

Originally posted by B&T
hmmm . . . good point about the number of files . . . it would be hard to get to 500mb let alone the 650mb with the current file limits.
Depends on what you're serving. If it's all html files and web graphics, you're right. Get a few large software packages and some documentation and it doesn't take many files to fill 500Mb or more.

IMNSHO, if you have over 15000 files you probably don't have the proper website design anyways - you should be looking at a database driven site where most of the actual content is in your database. There are exceptions, of course (photos don't belong in a database, for one).

[sandy]

There are exceptions, of course (photos don't belong in a database, for one).

That's the issue with my site (not that I'm going to exceed the 15K in files. My site is primarily photos, lots of them. I can see where a 15K limit can hurt some sites, but "we" should be in the minority.

I agree that a database would be better for others.

Sandy

[Hydraman]

Thanx Powweb! :D

[omatic]

Originally posted by RocketJeff
There are exceptions, of course (photos don't belong in a database, for one). Why not just insert them as some sort of BLOBs? IMO, as another benefit of that, having them in a DB would actually ease the indexing and retrieval parts of an image library. I haven't tried this but I'm sure it could be done.

Cheers,
omatic

[mjp]

Originally posted by omatic
Why not just insert them as some sort of BLOBs? In my experience inserting your navigation images or other small images into a database as blobs is fine, but with larger images - pretty much anything over 25k - images as database blobs begin to drag a bit. You'll usually see faster loading as image files. Especially in a shared database server environment. ;)

mjp

[B&T]

back to that number of files issue . . .

I just check my space. I am using 2500 files and 200MB. I would think my use somewhat typical of websites - maybe not.

But that would mean I could grow to 1GB and be OK with the 15000 file limit.

In fact . . . I bet that is where Powweb is taking us. I have seen ads for the 1GB hosting. It won't be long before Powweb does that. And it would be a pretty safe thing for them to do anyway. It would be interesting to see how many users are using the 500MB of yesterday. I bet the vast majority of the users are under 100MB. Maybe Powweb will share some stats with us someday.

So . . . back to my earlier posts . . . this is a great upgrade.

[mjp]

From the FAQ:

We host thousands of websites and 99% of them use well under 650 MB. The average website uses approximately 5-50 MB of space.

From working in support I'd say the average is right around 50mb. It is true that a minority of users utilize what's available to them. But if you are in that minority it's nice to have the extra breathing room.

mjp

[omatic]

Originally posted by mjp
... but with larger images - pretty much anything over 25k - images as database blobs begin to drag a bit. You'll usually see faster loading as image files. Especially in a shared database server environment. ;) Oh yeah, I can't begin to argue with that. But at least it would avoid the number-of-files limitation.

Cheers,
omatic

[RocketJeff]

Originally posted by mjp
In my experience inserting your navigation images or other small images into a database as blobs is fine, but with larger images - pretty much anything over 25k - images as database blobs begin to drag a bit. You'll usually see faster loading as image files. Especially in a shared database server environment. ;)
Exactly, I've been the DBA for database where people have tried to use it to storing large images and it just doesn't work well - it slows the database, makes administration (like performance tuning and query optimization) difficult, makes backups difficult, and accessing the images isn't as easy has having them on the standard filesystem. And this was with hi end databases like SQL Server and Oracle.

Almost all recomendations are to keep large images (or any other large binary file) as a regular file and just keep 'pointers' to them in the database. Let the file system handle what it does the best (files) and the database handle what it does the best (data).

[HalfaBee]

Could you imagine keep 15,000 pics in the database and still keep under the 3600/36000 limit ? ( Wouldn't an increase here be a nice upgrade for some people )

If you had that many images you could always zip them and extract them when needed, with a cache of the most recently used ones. A bit of smart php could keep this under control.

As for the 2G limit it would be nice to have some automated way to know your usage to avert a site shutdown. I know the figures may be in ops ( if working ) but this is not really suitable.

HalfaBee

[Jeff321]

Thanks once again PowWeb... when I signed up over 2 years ago I remember there was 70 MB space. Today, the service is the same exact price but with 650 MB, more bandwidth, etc. I don't know how they do it! ;)

[davidw55]

Originally posted by HalfaBee
As for the 2G limit it would be nice to have some automated way to know your usage to avert a site shutdown. I know the figures may be in ops ( if working ) but this is not really suitable.

HalfaBee

I would think that even if Powweb does not provide some means of doing this, that there would be either a program out there or service (or both) that could be installed to handle something like this. Is there a way to poll the webstats via an API, etc. to get this information on a daily or hourly basis using something like cron, etc? I'm pretty new to the webmaster thing, so forgive me if this is way out in left field...

David

[HalfaBee]

Its not out of 'left field', I could write a small php script to suck the whole access log in and work back thru the accesses ading them up for 24 hours.

The question is, how much sense does it make to duplicate the figure they already have, waiting to shut down your site the minute it goes over 2GB.

We are all on shared servers so the overhead of every site doing the same thing would really bog down the server.

Maybe an email when the site got to 1.9 GB would be a nice idea. :)

HalfaBee

[davidw55]

Originally posted by HalfaBee
Maybe an email when the site got to 1.9 GB would be a nice idea. :)

I would be all for that or something similar :). This is one of the only disadvantages I see to hosting here (well, other than the MySQL thing). I know a lot of people would probably not agree, but I would rather know that if I were to go over the 2GB limit that I would be charged X $ for every Y over the limit up to a final cutoff where the site would then be taken down. But, this would be after the initial overage and charge along with notification so that you at least have a chance to manage the situation before you find yourself with a commercial customer that has their site down and unable to accept/process orders. :( Maybe I am just expecting too much from shared hosting, especially for this price.

David

[Calash]

I know I am late on this but...


WOW!!


Now all I need are people to visit my site so I can use the extra space and limits :)

Thanks Powweb

[dwaynedixon]

http://forum.powweb.com/showthread.php?threadid=21320

[alphadesk]

dwaynedixonthe new space limit is just MARKETING, not real If you dont want the extra space and bandwith...create me an FTP user and I'll put it to good use. Also..are you the one saying you needed alot more pop email? Now you have 650 ;)

[dwaynedixon]

my point is this:

"they could offer 50 gig of space and 1000 gig of transfer, but it means nothing if the query and file restriction remains the same as it was with 250meg and 3600 connections an hour."




Maybe for certain situation it means a little something, but for most, it doesn't seem to. Maybe I can't see the forest for the trees though.... not sure.

[RocketJeff]

Originally posted by dwaynedixon
Maybe for certain situation it means a little something, but for most, it doesn't seem to. Maybe I can't see the forest for the
trees though.... not sure.

For the few people actually complaining that Powweb increaded some limits it may not mean much, but it does help other people.

If you're hosting large files (video/audio/somftware downloads/etc), this is an excellent thing. Some people seem to be of the opinion that if it's not a good thing for them that it isn;t good for anyone.

And, again, of you have over 15000 files I thing you really should look at how your site is designed.

[dwaynedixon]

For whatever data you can put in a file, instead of a db, it is a great idea.

The reason is that it gives the search engine spiders something to chew on and those files represent the size of your site. This is recognized by the search engines. Data in a db is for the most part invisible to search engine spiders.

You're site will gain a higher place in the search engine listing if you site gives the spriders something to index.


Video/audio/software files: yes, these are a case in which someone will probably benefit from the increase in space though watch out for that bandwidth limit.

[RocketJeff]

Originally posted by dwaynedixon
Data in a db is for the most part invisible to search engine spiders.

You're site will gain a higher place in the search engine listing if you site gives the spriders something to index.
If your first assumption was true, you'd be right. There are many ways to make a website database driven and have it fully indexable by a search engine (it won't even look database driven). A few minutes spend at web-site design sites should show you a couple.

Making thousands of files for this reason is unnecessary.

[dwaynedixon]

As simple as it might be to do what you say, I'm not interested. I'd rather have files to conserve on queries.

See this site: http://www.craigslist.org

then go to the forums.

I can imagine that the links on the left are coming from a db, however the links on the right are pages.

Considering the size of this site (much bigger than it appears), there are probably 100,000 or even more pages on the right. It makes good sense to make these "pages" on the right as "files" because they're simply read only and it is one less query for the db.

So, when it comes to 1500 queries an hour.... it makes a huge difference.

And the added bonus is that the spiders have a real directory to eat at.

[Rc2000]

Awesome. :D
Between my 2 packages, with all my images, wavs, and Quicktime clips, I'm barely using a third of all this extra space. But it's good to know the extra is there in case I really do need it.

Thanks Powweb.

Rc