Forum file storage is on own drive

[93Regina]

I did get a takedown notice from VCNA's legal departmeny...

As noted, older vehicles, I can see no logical reason for OEMs to object...I spend little time on Volvotips, but iirc, they have an arrangement with Volvo.

If OEMs played "hard ball," DIY-ers would remember, and some for life.

[93Regina]

I did get a takedown notice

"Disclaimer: Volvotips has the exclusive courtesy of Volvo Car Corporation and Volvo Cars Heritage to publish the Volvo Greenbooks (service manual), parts catalogs and other Volvo-material and publications. Commercial use and publishing at other websites of these items is prohibited."

[Ozark Lee]

I wish it wasn't as expensive, but it is and at the end of the day it's not a not a huge cost. The whole enchilada is a few hundreds of dollars/month. MVS is a business, and I'm happy to pay this business expense. It's a virtual product and thus the costs are a fraction of a physical business, so I'm really hesitant to complain.

To be fair, this 75GB attached drive is a paltry $10/month extra. But that scales up quickly as we can see with this $1900 storage price. But hey, if I ran a site that needed that much storage, the site would be making way more than MVS does, and probably that too would be a justifiable expense.

The drive space thing at MVS is -- despite this recent change -- historically not a huge problem. The MVS server is a 4GB/80GB quad-core virtual machine, and 80GB was enough to run the forum software (.4 million posts), Wordpress (1500 posts), tens of thousands of images/attachments, with a lot of traffic (relatively) for about three years. In the business world, that's a big win. Car sites are simply not storage intensive endeavors. I can take enough photos with my fancy Nikon (RAW, 45MB files) in an afternoon to fill up MVS storage. Yet 80GB was enough to take us through MVS year 15.

My choices were to use attached storage, or re-image the server to a different virtual machine with a larger natural storage capacity. The second option was not at all palatable to me, because it would have required a different IP address, different machine name, different... stuff. Too many changes to be comfortable with. DNS changes... the problems cascade. I have to babysit the machine as it is. Big changes are always going to cause temporary havoc. Let sleeping dogs lie, etc.

As far as moving to another host, it's not worth it. At the risk of using too many idioms, I'll say to that: better the devil you know than the devil you don't know. I'm happy. I'd rather pay for overkill rather than underkill. Been there, done that. Doesn't pay.

I feel bad, I know a bunch of the stuff eating up the storage is duplicated. Since there really isn't a way to select an image from a personal gallery to attach I know I have posted the same images dozens of times into different threads. What would be slick is to come up with a routine that calculates the HASH of all of the images and then correlates the duplicates as one image back into the previous posts.

The price thing sucks but the data centers have you by the shorties - their data center, their rules. There is a 40 TB (12x 3.6 TB drives) Lenovo NAS server with dual Xeons on Craigslist locally for $2500. If it had a RAID controller I would buy it since I really need to set up off site backups for the office and I have four off premises locations that are tied together with 50 mbps microwave links. It would be a snap to set up since the off premises sites are on the same domain as the rest of the office and it would be just about like having it racked up next to the other servers.

...Lee

[matthew1]

Good point on the duplicates - one area where phpBB is poor is dupe attachment management.

The good news is it's not a big deal because it's really not much additional $ per month (in this case), and the effort to get it off the ground is a one-time time investment. Now that it's done, we're good for probably ten years.

Co-location of a physical server would be a pretty fun thing, I've always thought. Let me know if you do this, Lee. I'd be interested in the details.

In 2008 I gave some thought to co-locating an old Mac tower G4 quad processor machine I had sitting unused, when it was time to move MVS off "shared hosting" at Dreamhost, where the site had been since 2003 or so.

Because serving is much more RAM, drive speed and ethernet speed -dependent rather than processor-dependent, this machine I suspect would have done ok. Even now it might work, but I wouldn't dream of actually employing it these days.

2008 is when I moved MVS to "big boy" hosting. For the first few years of big boy hosting, it was on a few different managed hosting virtual machines, then finally an unmanaged virtual machine where it is now.

Managed hosting was so frustrating to me. I couldn't see what they were doing, and they didn't care to discuss it in depth. It was just another account for them. Just so long as it was up, from their perspective. For me, speed was a giant problem. I can't count how many hours I spent writing emails discussing speed.

For what it's worth, many of the non-attachment images are served by Amazon Cloud (AWS) at the domain images.matthewsvolvosite.com. That takes a large burden off the MVS server. I've had that running since 2010 or so. I'm very happy with AWS, and it's laughably inexpensive, on the order of $4/month for several thousand images.

I could have used that for attachments, but decided to keep things a little simpler by having attachments stay "local".