I've noticed that over the past month the site loads up on my computer very very slowly from time to time. Saying that it's sometimes instant i don't have this problem anywhere else just the ssvc forum. I know it's not me because I'm running a very up-to-date system on broadband, can it slow down when lots of user are on site?

usually ok here, awful tonight tho, driving me nuts.

Logging off for now lol. I'll catch up tomorrow x

I've reported it to our hosting company, nothing I can do (other than have a beer).
John

had a beer John now off to bed thanks for reply

All looks ok now. Having the beer seemed to have sorted it. I'll have to remember that for next time.

lol, i reckon it was the bottle of wine I drunk that fixed it

Think you both jumped the gun was fast this morning but back to slow again, it must have something to do with numbers online

Bah, it's too early in the day for a beer so I'll have to think of some other way of fixing it. The site should be able to cope with far more than are currently online so I don't think it's usage related. It's been reported to our hosting company so hopefully they can resolve it.

yep back on go slow here too, got this page cannot be displayed 3 times

Our hosting company believe thay have resolved the issue so all should be well now (and we've got a free month as an apology).
John

Hi, just wanted to say that the site seems to be running slowly again. In fairness, this seems to be during peak hours, say 7 to 10pm, but it seems as if the site is struggling to cope with the load.

This got me thinking about numbers...

The page 'About the SSVC' says that the club has about 1,300 members at present, whereas the SSVC Forum has 7,300 registered members and probably as many lurkers who aren't registered, maybe 15,000 total.

So... would it benefit the club to offer a Premium membership for SSVC forum members, in similar fashion to TheSamba? You could give this to existing club members as a bonus, and offer it as part of the benefits of joining the club, so new and existing club members would not need to pay extra or do anything at all, in fact, but would gain a gold star or similar bling item next to their user name on the forum

Whereas for the 6,000+ forum members who aren't club members, it would offer a chance to support the forum, while remaining totally optional. I speak from experience here, as I happily pay 45 US dollars a year for Premium membership of theSamba. I appreciate that theSamba is different, as it is a website only and not a club as such, but I hope you can see my point. Personally, I would be happy to pay the same every year to support the SSVC Forum, which I think of as "home" on the Internet.

Anyway, say the club offered Premium membership for 20 quid a year, nice and simple. If only 1% of non-club members took it up, that would be 60 x 20 = 1200 quid a year. With 1200 a year, we could upgrade or change our internet service provider, or even buy our own server! You can get a decent-spec server for as little as a grand these days. I realise there would be a little extra admin involved, but extra income would help the site... We could also send Everett a crate of beer for copying his idea


There we go, just a little idea I had. My wildly generous offer of 20 quid a year stands firm! Over to you, site admins

Thanks for the ideas Dermot.

The slow performance now only occasionally hits us (tonight being one of those occasions). We do share the server with other customers of the hosting company who occasionaly take up more resource than they should.

Although you can buy servers for £1k getting one hosted in a supported data centre with backups, hardware and system support would be significantly more than the £1k. For us a shared service is all we need. If the slow nights came more often we'd look at new hosting but for now the company has been very good for us (last time we had a weekend of poor performance we got a months free hosting).

The forums are provided by the club as a service for fans of Splittys so generally we'd be against giving a "premium" service for members. That being said we are looking at bringing online some new members services over the next year.

We actually have 3105 active users on the forums the other 4,000 are viagra and Russian bride salesmen who can't post (I clear them out every few months returning any unused Russian Brides).

You so kind,

And VOTM still only gets about 50 votes a month, why are those 3000 users not getting involved????

Thanks for the reply Doc.

4,000 Viagra salesmen?! Don't suppose they would pay up

All the best!