4.06.2004

armchair quarterback :: boingboing's growing pains

after reading about boingboing's recent bandwidth crunch i've come up with a few ideas and collected some others from the discussion that may help.

  • move to a dedicated box
    if i recall correctly, boingboing is hosted with a whole bunch of other sites at your standard, everyday webhost. there are plenty of hosts out there that can offer a colocated box with 30-50gb of transfer for under $100/month.
    updata: andy pointed out to me via im that servermatrix has plans that offer 1000 gigs of transfer on a colocated server starting at $89/month. that's freaking cheap!
  • optimize the code
    seriously, i don't know how many times the font tag needs to be used on a given page. i understand that y'all are writers and not web designers but that shit has to go.
  • text ad supported rss
    apparently, mehack has been doing this. i'm not sure what sort of success they've been having with it, but it's a start. i'm sure there are plenty of mt hackers that would be more than happy to help you bang something like this together. it also opens the gateway for...
  • paid services
    described best as "the livejournal model", it shouldn't be too hard to offer other services like discussions and ad free pages/rss to people who pay $5/month or $50/year. have a password protected vhost [paid.boingboing.net] that offers unrestricted access for subscribers. it's as simple as having movabletype output the ad-free files to a seperate directory and working out an .htaccess based authentication system.

i had one or two more, but they sort of escaped me. i'll be sure to update this post as soon as i remember them.

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