CamonnaTong Posted February 16, 2011 Share Posted February 16, 2011 Watch it that can be very offensive. Even if you do censor it that can still get you banned. Just a warning from a member. yeah sorry alright. just got home from work and came onto my favorite fallout site and my ears exploded... it set me off and i apologise. you are right about paying the bills. No problem, I forgive you. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HappyHerring Posted February 16, 2011 Share Posted February 16, 2011 Unfortunately I just cannot affort to become a premium supporter of the nexus, for that and also the reason of so much pleasure provided I'm fully prepared to accept the advertising policies as driven by neccessity on the site. Even before I joined I lurked at the fringes gobbling down sub 2meg downloads and very much appreciate everything I've had from the site. I don't crawl here but for someone like me who only previously used the net for walkthroughs and total war mod downloads this site is a boon which needs to be apprecieated by us non premium members in particular. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheTerminator2004 Posted February 16, 2011 Share Posted February 16, 2011 (edited) I don't mind the ads too much; the popups were extraordinarily annoying, and the ads which play sound, or worse, set off my antivirus, really make this site seem pretty dodgy. But since these flash videos don't play for me, the site usually looks fairly clean and professional, as the majority of other ads are a couple of unobtrusive banners in the corner. Anything more than that does give a bad impression, imo. If the site does cost £80,000 a month to run, then I completely understand the need for these ads, so I'm not complaining at all. But I have to say, £80,000 a month does seem like a bizarrely high running cost for a website, even one of this size. It sounds to me like there are probably quite a few cost-cutting measures you could take which would greatly reduce the need for all the intrusive ads. I don't know how much bandwidth this site uses, so obviously it's hard to give any kind of accurate estimate, but assuming the site uses around 6TB/month bandwidth, and takes up around 8TB storage space (based on your post here) then storage and bandwidth for both the site and file servers shouldn't cost you more than $2-3000 a month tops. Hell, according to my calculations (which again, may not be accurate, and certainly don't take into account all the potential factors), you could run the entire site off Amazon's S3 cloud (which is one of the more expensive storage solutions around) for $2614 a month. And that would give you a global CDN, multiple redundant backup, and unlimited expansion space, plus no need to worry about maintenance etc. You may need to add an extra $500-1000 to that cost depending on how you set things up; you'll need to take into account processor time for handling database queries etc, but nothing too significant. Amazon's EC2 HPC cluster is quite good for small tasks like hosting websites of this size. There are cheaper solutions too, in terms of monthly running cost, but they would mostly require investment in new hardware; and I doubt that's feasible. If you can afford to invest in significant amounts of new hardware, then Backblaze-style storage pods are probably the cheapest solution for storage, but that doesn't take bandwidth into account. And it would require building the system from the ground up, which would be difficult. Of course if you hire a web developer on a full-time basis, and a part time software developer, I guess that probably takes up the lion's share of the monthly cost anyway, but my point still stands: it sounds like there are some efficiency savings to be made which could mean being able to remove the more irritating ads, which in turn would make this site look a lot more professional (though it's improved massively over the past couple of years anyway). References: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/http://calculator.s3....com/calc5.html Edited February 16, 2011 by The_Terminator Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dark0ne Posted February 16, 2011 Share Posted February 16, 2011 If the site does cost £80,000 a month to run A year, not a month. RE: bandwidth calculations. 125TB of bandwidth a month. If we take your Amazon example of $2614 for 6TB of bandwidth (or $435 for 1TB) that would be a monthly bill of $54,458 ;) I know what I'm doing :) RE: traffic going down; the trend is upwards right now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CommanderCrazy Posted February 16, 2011 Share Posted February 16, 2011 Too much maths for me. :huh: I think I'll stick to my mods. :P Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rabbit1251 Posted February 16, 2011 Share Posted February 16, 2011 I can't stand animated adverts. When I visit the BBC I have a special ad block that I use to block the ads from my view. If that doesn't work then I just won't read the articles. I get distracted from what I am trying to do when they are running. It prays on my nerves to try and get a download from the Nexus when an annoying, flashing advert is vying for my attention. Removing them is part of the reason that I am a Premium member here. The other reason is to help support the site. Face it, ladies and gentlemen, the mods here are not free. They are paid for, each and every one, in one of three ways. Out of Robin's pocket, from the members by Premium membership or by advertisements. And I'm sure that Robin Scott does not wish to bare the expense of this site just for his own amusement. This is a business after all. So that leaves it to us to cough up the dough. And speaking of Robin Scott I hope indeed that he is making a boatload of money off of this site. He has put in a lot of work to build the Nexus up from pretty much a failed website to what we see today. And he did it all himself while still in school learning his letters. I certainly won't begrudge him this. Being a Premium Member I have missed the nasty adverts that people are complaining about here. If I had to deal with them I would probably be angry too. But it's not like you do not have other options to get around them after all. So after all is said and done please just put me down for a "NO" vote for your petition. And I hope to still me a member here come the release of Skyrim in the Fall. The Rabbit Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zaldir Posted February 16, 2011 Share Posted February 16, 2011 A definite "NO!" to your petition from me! Your petition seems like a "Down with the Nexus!", as if there are no ads, there won't be any income to finance the site, and we will all have to pack up and leave. And where would we go? Planet Elder Scrolls...? God no...And you want pop-ups/unders instead? Where have you been the last months?! Pop-ups and pop-unders were complained about by many more than who complains about the video ad! This is why video ads are here at all, because people couldn't stand the pop-ups/unders! £80.000 ($128,000) a year is a lot of money, and I don't think Rob wants to pay that out of his own pocket! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheTerminator2004 Posted February 17, 2011 Share Posted February 17, 2011 (edited) If the site does cost £80,000 a month to run A year, not a month. RE: bandwidth calculations. 125TB of bandwidth a month. If we take your Amazon example of $2614 for 6TB of bandwidth (or $435 for 1TB) that would be a monthly bill of $54,458 ;) I know what I'm doing :) RE: traffic going down; the trend is upwards right now. Well now I feel like an idiot. That'll teach me to post while drunk, I guess :P As for the 125TB of bandwidth a month: Bloody hell. That's a pretty staggering amount, I'd never have expected that much even from a site this size. In that case, yeah, Amazon S3 is definitely not the way to go. It's good for reasonable quantities, but when you need significant amounts of something (be that storage space, bandwidth, or computing time), it quickly becomes inefficient. You could probably still make long-term savings by replacing those DELL servers, but since that would require a fairly big initial investment of capital, it would only yield benefits in the long term; and is almost certainly too expensive to afford, unless you have a huge load of cash saved up you're not telling us about. So yeah, pointless even mentioning it really. When you need to expand your file servers in the future, however, you might want to look into using something like the BackBlaze storage pods for the extra space - I've looked into them as part of a study I'm doing for my degree (looking into the possibilities for designing a national HPC centre; pretty interesting stuff), and it seems that a custom solution like that is the cheapest way to go per petabyte. Edited February 17, 2011 by The_Terminator Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ferryt Posted February 17, 2011 Share Posted February 17, 2011 I'm not even going to try to read all the responses to the opening message in this thread, because I can pretty much predict the full range of opinions that have been expressed. I'd just like to throw in my two-cents' worth (and that's probably all it's worth since it's nothing but a personal opinion). I don't want popups. Those are the second most annoying kind of advertising in existence, right after pop-overs. The problem with the latest advertising scheme is that I'm forced to endure the same handful of advertisements over and over and over ad nauseum. I wasn't interested in the product the first time. Does anyone think that by shoving it down my throat a gazillion more times that I'm going to change my mind? Quite the contrary. Repetition breeds contempt. I've already seen all the advertisements the download section of this site has to offer -- many times over. I've either already decided to buy the product or decided I don't want to buy the product. But I still keep getting fed the same advertisements. They average about thirty seconds in length. I can block them, but why even bother trying? The download isn't going to start until the advertisement finishes, whether the download of that advertisement commences or not. I detest this. I also accept it as a necessary evil. No, I'm not going to watch the advertisement, but I'm going to let it download so Nexus gets credit for a view. Fortunately, I don't have a bandwidth issue with my ISP or I would be blocking them. Also, fortunately, I don't use external speakers. I use a headset, so I don't have to listen to the advertisement, either. Most game-related advertisements are extraordinarily obnoxious with regard to sound levels, so this is a Good Thing for me ... and the rest of my family. I just click on something else and read it, and wait until until my folder icon in the task bar starts flashing, alerting me that the download folder has recorded a successful download. Or, I go get a cup of coffee, or make me a sandwich, or go to the bathroom, or check to see if it's raining, outside. I can live with it. It doesn't mean I approve of the fact that we have un-skippable advertisements, though. It just means I tolerate them because it means we still have Nexus. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Skevitj Posted February 17, 2011 Share Posted February 17, 2011 Here's another change in tack: Would people who object to the video adds support them if they only contained a certain type of content? ie, The only adds which popped up were for other video games and/or movie. I'm not sure if its even a viable option short of starting a new advertising distribution company, but if it is possible and practical... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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