I have finally finished and uploaded my first video podcast, which is about Terragen 2 Technology Preview! You can go to my website (http://www.emptosoft.plus.com/) to see the video podcast or subscribe to this feed (http://ccgi.emptosoft.plus.com/main_site/e107_plugins/podcast/podcast.php) in iTunes.
WARNING: PLEASE RESPECT MY BANDWIDTH ALLOWANCE - THE VIDEO PODCAST IS QUITE BIG (the Windows Media version is 8.1MB and the MP4 version is 6.6MB). DO NOT GO CRAZY AND DOWNLOAD IT 500 TIMES. IF POSSIBLE, DON'T DOWNLOAD IT AT ALL FOR SEVERAL DAYS.
If anybody does go nuts, my site will simply be shut down and I will have to write a particularly remorseful email to get it back...
[Edit: 18th Jan 2008]
I have, rather smoothly, moved things to a new domain name and from my website to my blog. The above links will still work for the forseeable future, but this link (http://www.g400.co.uk/blog/pl/vpodcast/1) will work for much longer and the files available there will be properly watched and maintained. I haven't had time to do a second video podcast yet, but I already intend to do a video podcast on my own TG2 render farm manager. However, that will be at least the third video podcast, because the second one (about Tenerife) has been planned. I will also need to finish my render farm before I do a video podcast about it...
Also...
WARNING REMOVED. My blog is much less bandwidth-intensive that my old website was, and I consequently now have bandwidth to burn.
[/Edit]
By the way, that was my 300th post. Isn't it funny how major posts and major post numbers coincide?
(3rd person with over 300 posts on the Planetside forums! Yey! :D)
Neet great job mate :) Watching it now.
As for your bandwith issue I will go all R. Lee Ermey on anyone who crashs the site...you all have no inklink on how much power I hold ;)
Regards,
Will
yea I know what you mean I got my 700th today too :P
Silly postmonsters... :P. I'm downloading the feed now, and I'll only do it once ;).
is it becuase you fear my wrath?
you're on your way your self there post wise.
regards,
Will
Eh... I'm always a bit confused about the desire for high numbers of posts. I honestly can't bring myself to care that much. I liked the podcast, Dark Fire. I admit that I was half-expecting to suffer through some ridiculously nasal-voiced nerd's rantings, but it was actually very tastefully done.
If you have bandwidth issues, I can host it for you. I get 5TB per month :P
^ how nice. And I agree with you comletely Old_blaggard I don't really care about the post number thats why I usaly don't bring. The podcast was, as you said, well done Dark Fire keep it up :)
Regards,
Will
Quote from: MeltingIce on February 17, 2007, 11:45:59 PM
If you have bandwidth issues, I can host it for you. I get 5TB per month :P
Woah. 5TB PER MONTH!? I've never even heard of such bandwidth allowance. Perhaps if my bandwidth allowance was measured per month that would be better, but unfortunately it is measured per day. Anyway, my calculations show that my website should (just about) come in under the bandwidth limit for today (provided the traffic levels stay roughly the same). Thanks for the offer MeltingIce, but I no longer think I'll need it...
Quote from: old_blaggard on February 17, 2007, 11:42:22 PM
Eh... I'm always a bit confused about the desire for high numbers of posts. I honestly can't bring myself to care that much.
I keep on trying to make myself not care, but the fact that I am now steaming ahead towards Oshyan in terms of post numbers, not on purpose I can assure you, has suddenly got me interested. However, I don't think I'll ever catch up with him - I'm bound to stop using these forums this much soon...
Quote from: old_blaggard on February 17, 2007, 11:42:22 PM
I liked the podcast, Dark Fire. I admit that I was half-expecting to suffer through some ridiculously nasal-voiced nerd's rantings, but it was actually very tastefully done.
Thanks. It did try to make this first video podcast easy for myself by taking it at a slow pace and letting the music and pictures do a lot of the work so I wouldn't have to talk too much...
With 5TB/mo I'm guessing you've grabbed the Site5 "$5 deal" plan like I did. :D If that's so, what do you think of it? I suppose you're hosting your entire current website off of it? Any resource/load issues so far? How long have you been on it?
- Oshyan
Quote from: Oshyan on February 18, 2007, 03:59:24 PM
With 5TB/mo I'm guessing you've grabbed the Site5 "$5 deal" plan like I did. :D If that's so, what do you think of it? I suppose you're hosting your entire current website off of it? Any resource/load issues so far? How long have you been on it?
- Oshyan
That deal is unbelievable (http://www.site5.com/images/ruiner/newmix/fivedollars2.png).
$5 per month is (roughly) £2.50 per month!Anyway, here is the main point of this post:
I WITHDRAW THE BANDWIDTH WARNING I POSTED EARLIER. YOU CAN NOW DOWNLOAD AND WATCH BOTH VERSIONS OF THE VIDEO PODCAST FREELY.
(The initial rush of traffic is over, so I'm not at risk of going over my bandwidth limit any more).
How much to they allow you per day?... also no probs watching the file seems quite fast...good job
My daily bandwidth limit is 250MB - which is quite stupid when you consider that I am also given 250MB of space. If I were to use all of my space, the entire website could only be downloaded once daily...
By the way, on Sunday about 289MB of data was downloaded, but no action seems to have been taken - I guess there is an allowance for random days when the amount of data downloaded is unusually high...
data limits here are also silly both in bandwidth and disk space. so i just use my 50mb free from my isp no data limit..
I would find 50MB very restrictive - I almost have that much stuff online now...
thats where http://fsphost.com/ comes in handy 250mb free unlimited traffic nice for file downloads....
Whw...That is wierd. How does something like that survive?
oh i just saw if you run out of 250mb on 1 account you can ask to have it increased by emailing them...
yeah i don't know how something like that stays in business but it is based in germany so maybe their isps are kind...
Quote from: Oshyan on February 18, 2007, 03:59:24 PM
With 5TB/mo I'm guessing you've grabbed the Site5 "$5 deal" plan like I did. :D If that's so, what do you think of it? I suppose you're hosting your entire current website off of it? Any resource/load issues so far? How long have you been on it?
- Oshyan
Yep, you got it. I absolutely LOVE Site5. They're an amazing web hosting company. Their tech support is spectacular and I rarely have issues with my server. Right now I am only using about 6GB/month but I get around 3000 unique viewers and 200,000 hits per month and the server doesn't even seem to flinch (probably due to the fact that it has 4 Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.80GHz processors). I would highly recommend this plan to anyone who is looking for a web host or hates their current one. It includes 55GB storage space, unlimited MySQL, Flashback (like a massive undo button for your entire site) and a ton of scripts that are a breeze to install through Fantastico.
Interesting... I'll definitely be looking into that if I ever need to move off of my current hosting service.
Just for another perspective, I've been with Site5 now for over a year and have had a total of 3 accounts hosted with them.
My initial experience was a bit mixed - support response time was great, but they kept saying they'd fixed my problem and hadn't. It lasted off and on for several months, apparent load and time-out issues. About 3 or 4 months after I started seeing the problems they disappeared almost entirely and things have been great on that account since.
When the $5 deal came out it was too good to pass up so I went ahead and bought another account. I've done little with it aside from hosting a Tech Preview mirror (ideal for the purpose) so I can't say much for its overall stability or anything, but it seems good from what I've seen anyway.
My real problems with them came when I decided to try them for a business-level host, using one of the existing packages (because they don't have business-specific packages). This was when it became clear that there really is a lot of "luck of the draw", with them as well as really any *budget* hosting company (Dreamhost, Bluehost, 1and1, etc. - they're all pretty similar).
First off I spent quite a while researching *other* hosts before coming back to them. Ultimately other hosts were either *way* too stringent or expensive for their services ($40/mo for 1GB storage and 50GB bandwidth or something), or they seemed shoddy, or just as much of a "crap shoot" as Site5. I figured I'd had good experience with Site5 and with the money back guarantee (60 day) and the low, low price I wasn't worried.
However there was still the question *which* package to choose, and here's where the problems began. I wanted the package that would give me the highest guaranteed level of site resources. According to their web pages that would be the "Diamond" package, with 32 clients per server (that's a number they quote in their advertising). http://www.site5.com/hosting/diamond.php Unfortunately in trying to confirm this I just couldn't get a clear answer. Eventually someone told me that the "resource allocation" was proportional to the space and bandwidth allotments and that the "$5 deal" plan would inherently have higher resource allowances and fewer clients per server/resource availability. That seemed too good to be true but he insisted that was the case.
Then I found some info on their forums saying the 32 client limit was probably not in effect any longer since some hardware changes to their server, though they claimed the overall level of resources per-client was still the same or better given the hardware upgrades. In other words they claimed to increase server power by say 10 times while only increasing client load by 8 times or something. Still, it seemed dubious, especially since they still advertised the 32 client number (and do to this day). Other issues like Site5 not being part of the Better Business Bureau and inconsistencies/lack of clarity in their advertising/promises continued to fuel my skepticism. But given the lack of risk involved and my past relatively good expeirence I figured I'd give it a try.
Unfortunately I ran into problems right away. The issue was *extremely* high server load at certain times of the day, sometimes consistently for several hours. I began charting the load and saw very disturbing trends. Often times I couldn't even access my control panel. After several discussions with support they finally determined it was one errant user who was playing with Ruby and did some stupid things. OK, fine, they figured it out, problem solved. Only it wasn't - it continued, off and on, for the next 2 weeks. This was in the middle of the 60 day evaluation period and had begun almost as soon as I got the account, so it was not encouraging, and unfortunately I had little time to fully evaluate before I decided whether to get a refund or not.
This problem prompted me to once again try to get a clear, firm, solid answer on what their "best" (in terms of resources) package was. I eventually took the step of even emailing one of their high-level managers and posting a lengthy message to the forums. I never got a response to the email and they determined that my public post was "inappropriate and inflammatory" so they moved to a private "customer inquiry" or something, to which I never got a satisfactory response either. Some my questions included the resource issues and possibility of false advertising (32 clients per server), as well as asking why they weren't BBB members. I can see why they felt threatened, but it was pretty low of them to just bury it.
After that bad experience with the forums and management, and the continuing resource problems (which did eventually seem to stop, but I wasn't going to count on it staying that way), I decided to cancel. I haven't regretted the decision, although I maintain (and even renewed) my other two accounts and continue to have good performance from both. I've definitely made good use of the accounts and appreciate their services. It's just unfortunate that they can't find a way to maintain consistency across their server fleet - it's really luck of the draw.
If I could have had guaranteed resource availability - for example in a Virtual Private Server (VPS) setup where there are actual resource divisions - then it would have been ok and I'd have stuck with it. But the shared environment just wasn't acceptable for business use. Frankly I don't think what I experienced was acceptable for any purpose, but it's cheap and you have to accept compromises. If you think about it logically there's no way they can offer what they're offering at that price without signficantly overselling, even though they claim they're not. There certainly are no free rides. ;D
So my advice is yes, give them a shot. You have little to lose with the 60 day money back guarantee and whatnot. But I would strongly advise setting up site monitoring systems as soon as you get your account and finding out the name of your server so you can search the forums for issues associated with it. From what I've seen certain servers just have a history of issues and it tends to *continue*. You do have the right to ask to be moved to a new server if you experience issues and I would recommend trying to find this out by doing stress testing, 24 hour monitoring, and forum searches within the first few weeks of purchasing your account, rather than waiting until you actually do have a problem long after you've setup your website and have all kinds of things configured. The process of moving to a new server can be painful and it's best done before you've spent much time configuring.
I suppose this kind of caution and testing is advisable no matter where you get hosting. It just seems all the more advisable with Site5 given the inconsistencies. That being said if you do get a good server the service is unbeatable at the price, so that's good. Other seemingly comparable hosts with which I don't have personal experience are http://www.dreamhost.com/ http://www.bluehost.com/ http://www.1and1.com/ etc. I've heard lots of people saying good things about Dreamhost and they have similarly "insane" resource allotments for the money...
- Oshyan
Very interesting Oshyan, I can understand why people have different experiences with Site5. I guess I got lucky, because so far mine has been pretty good. Sometimes the control panel is a little slow, and Flashback doesn't really work that well for me (it was even disabled for some time for performance issues) but my overall satisfaction with them is pretty high. You can check out your servers system information at anytime by the way by going to http://servername.site5.com/~netadmin So for instance, I'm on the helius server, so my servers system information is at http://helius.site5.com/~netadmin
Yes, I made extensive use of the server information/status pages, as well as some off-site 3rd party status tracking and graphing systems for Site5 servers which community members have made available. All very handy.
It's definitely true that there is a degree of luck involved in any such purchase. I just wish the results would be less dramatically different as I have had both very good and very bad experiences with Site5. I've heard good things about Dreamhost and am considering trying them out for comparison soon. All these plans are so cheap it's not really a problem to buy several and compare. I can always find ways to use the space and bandwidth. ;) Also keep in mind Godaddy.com, cheap domain registrar, also provides decent, cheap hosting, and being the large, reliable company that they are, their infrastructure is good and reliability high. The only complaint I have there is regarding their proprietary control panel which I don't like as well as Site5 (Cpanel variant).
- Oshyan
I'd just like to point out, since I started this discussion with my lack of bandwidth, that there's nothing wrong with using your ISP for hosting rather than actually paying (:'() a proper hosting company. The amount of space and bandwidth I get from my ISP, for no extra money above the cost of my internet connection, is actually very good. I also have lots of useful features thrown in (databases and stuff) as well as a great customer service (http://www.plus.net/wizard/). The initial surge of downloads of the video podcast (http://ccgi.emptosoft.plus.com/main_site/page.php?21) is the only thing my limits have struggled to deal with, but nobody seems to have cared that my website creeped over the limit for a single day...
do you mean us or the hosting company?
Hehe. Not you - my ISP (which hosts my website). Check out this page (http://ccgi.emptosoft.plus.com/main_site/comment.php?comment.news.130) for the official stats from last month...
cool podcast!
different pronounciation of Terragen...I guess Ive never heard anyone apart from myself say it!!
I say terragen with a sharp A like apple, as opposed to a soft A like arm??
anyhow I will look forward to seeing/hearing more!
:)
Quote from: Dark Fire on March 14, 2007, 02:06:12 PM
Hehe. Not you - my ISP (which hosts my website). Check out this page (http://ccgi.emptosoft.plus.com/main_site/comment.php?comment.news.130) for the official stats from last month...
Lol, and this is why I need an actual web host to host my site, not just my ISP: http://stats.designpaths.com/
(thats just for designpaths.com, so it doesn't include anything from the meltingice.net domain, which is the same server)
:P
Quote from: MeltingIce on March 14, 2007, 11:33:00 PM
Quote from: Dark Fire on March 14, 2007, 02:06:12 PM
Hehe. Not you - my ISP (which hosts my website). Check out this page (http://ccgi.emptosoft.plus.com/main_site/comment.php?comment.news.130) for the official stats from last month...
Lol, and this is why I need an actual web host to host my site, not just my ISP: http://stats.designpaths.com/
(thats just for designpaths.com, so it doesn't include anything from the meltingice.net domain, which is the same server)
:P
Those stats are not much less than the total stats for my
entire website, which is split across two servers. Clearly you do need a proper web host.
Quote from: inkydigit on March 14, 2007, 04:02:42 PM
cool podcast!
different pronounciation of Terragen...I guess Ive never heard anyone apart from myself say it!!
I say terragen with a sharp A like apple, as opposed to a soft A like arm??
anyhow I will look forward to seeing/hearing more!
:)
Your way is probably right - I've just got into the habit of using my unique pronunciation, which makes Terragen sound more like a single word rather than the word fragments 'Terra' and 'Gen' stuck together...
I recently moved my site from GoDaddy to Site5 (the $5 deal) because images almost never loaded completely from GoDaddy. It didn't seem to be my connection because other sites built with the same software (RapidWeaver & Carousel) loaded correctly. I seem to have landed on one of the better servers - so far everything works.
Check out my first (and only - so far) Terragen image in the 'other worlds' section on my site. Someday, I'll have more time...
That's an interesting picture. The low bright green clouds looks rather spooky...
First podcast I've ever viewed, so wasn't sure what to expect, but a ranting nerd it wasn't. Very enjoyable, although I must say I've never encountered the purple plague that you seemed to have.
Quotecool podcast!
different pronounciation of Terragen...
Bloody unique if you ask me inky. LOL
Here's the scary bit: I didn't watch any other video podcasts before I made mine. In fact, the only podcasts I listened to at all were the ones here (http://www.southanuk.co.uk/podcastsss/).
By the way, the main reason I don't like the 'Terra Gen' pronunciation is because it makes Terragen sound like one of those strange semi-abandoned programs, with names that are simply a lot of word fragments stuck together, that you find on places like Softpedia (http://www.softpedia.com/). If I had put some thought into the video podcast, I probably would have used that pronunciation, but I had a strict deadline to meet and therefore I forgot.
Quote from: RedSquare on March 17, 2007, 10:03:47 PM
Very enjoyable, although I must say I've never encountered the purple plague that you seemed to have.
I am currently testing version 1.8.76.0 to see if it has the same problem...
Hmm...I seem to have forgotten about this topic...
I don't think I ever found that error again - it was unique to the first public version of the technology preview. :D
Ah...Good times...