How about some stats?

[Lerxst]

Dear bosses,

I was wondering, being an old haggerd ITer for years now, how the site is run.

Is it running in the cloud or in a basement? It never seems to be down for maintenance. It must eat up disk space with all the posts and the uploads - assume there is a DB backend.

And, it must cost money to run. I understand doing things for the love of it and admire that but I still wouldn't mind contributing something.

Just interested to know some juicy nerdy info.

Thanks

[Beechwoods]

Hi Chris...

We're running a pretty standard vBulletin installation here. vBulletin uses a MySQL backend. The database is now about 8 years old and is just over 2GB in size. It's pretty efficient. We do pay for a properly hosted system (Linux with an Apache web-server), and most maintenance is done without impacting uptime. I tend to try and avoid taking the system offline as much as we can, but it probably has to happen once or twice a year to allow for version upgrades and whatnot.

vBulletin is out of box software, but very configurable. The basic look and feel is pretty standard, but I spent quite a bit of time on the CSS to get it working how we wanted... mostly in terms of the design. Rob / Filterlab has to be credited with getting the site online in the first place, coming up with the original colour-scheme and layout... that was on vBulletin v3 - we're now on v4 which required quite a bit of rework to maintain what we liked about the v3 look, while retaining the good bits of v4...

Glad you're enjoying the site.

[Lerxst]

Great! Thanks for the reply. That is pretty small for an 8-year old DB. Mostly text I guess.

Yeah, I can see it looked different before. Lot better now though.

Congrats on the design.

[Marco]

Thanks for your enquiry, Chris. No problem - always happy to help, as I see Nick has done. Cheers, Nick.


And, it must cost money to run.

I can confirm that it does, and not an inconsiderable amount either, as I pay the bills! ;)

In that respect, any contributions would be gratefully accepted. If you PM me, I'll give you the necessary details :)

Marco.