Mike's Railroad Crossing Forum

I'm sure it's known by now that the site maxed its bandwidth quota (again), as evidenced by yesterday's downtime. However, I honestly feel that the continuous updates to the site are the primary cause. There definitely is a way to cut back on this from happening, possibly to the point of imposing restrictions on the images. Back in the day, Mike imposed size/resolution restrictions because of the fact that not all of his visitors had broadband access. Nowadays, that isn't much of a problem; however, the problem now exists server-side when thousands of images are being uploaded that are all a couple of megabytes in size. This leads to several gigabytes of data being in use, and I can understand why the hosting provider would condemn that.

Here are a couple of solutions that I can think of that may prevent this issue from coming back ever again:

• Impose file size restrictions on images: That is, if you want to continue hosting the images on the site. This will reduce file sizes for each image from a couple of megabytes down to a couple of kilobytes, thus reducing load on the server whenever they get viewed by a visitor and when they're getting uploaded.

• Consider using imgur as the host of images: Imgur is by far the best image-uploading service to exist on the web right now. The images can be easily embedded into the HTML code of pages on the site, and there's HTML code to size the images down into thumbnails that y'all can use. Additionally, bandwidth is unlimited with them, even with a free account. External hosting of images on the pages will also reduce the stress on the site's server as well and potentially reduce the amount of bandwidth used towards the quota on the server.

For the most part, pages can still be hosted on the site since HTML pages should not even be that large in size.

These are just merely suggestions at this point, and feedback for the most part. Mike, David, and/or Tommy, if y'all want to consider any of these measures, I'm here to help if you guys need any.

With kind regards,
Zach

We have unlimited bandwidth. Normally what happens when we "hit the limit" now is that we just send in a ticket to the ISP and they either increase the bandwidth we have for the month or just reset how much we've used. However, today we decided it wasn't worth submitting a ticket for since it'd just be reset within 24 hours.

We might start "re-imposing" image size limits, though we'll just simple use the photo resizing programs we already have to reduce them down to a proper size.

That really shouldn't be something you guys need to continuously do though. In fact it sounds contradictory on the host's part to even cut you guys off when y'all are receiving "unlimited bandwidth."

The main reason why the bandwidth is set at a specific quota by the hosting provider is so it doesn't get wasted, at least that's what I was told.. As much as we would like it to be automatically increased, that isn't the case. The same goes for the storage space.

I try to check it on a daily basis (provided I remember) to make sure these interruptions don't happen. It's still an improvement over the service Mike originally set up back in the day.


MG