- Take PayPal donations
- Make it clear I'm thinking about taking this more seriously (full-time)
- Premium offering
- Want to say "Thank You"
- Be more open with users
- Explain that I'm wrestling with whether or not to quit school and go full-time on this
- Get to know my users
- Get them on the phone, email, IM
- Email a few hundred of them
- Forum admins all need to all know who am
- Less important to connect with participants, but they can if they want (they might start their own forums soon)
- Problem, opportunity, audience - get to know my users and then I'll know what skills to learn and people to bring in
- Be clear on exactly what needs to be done on the site
- People are very excited when they can be used - people want a place in the world where they can be helpful
- So be clear about my needs
- Someone can very specifically provide for those needs
- We have ideas we'd like to implementI
- I'd like to get to know you and what you're doing with the service
Possible hosting option
Fremont
8anet.com, 1/2-U
$1500, 6 GB RAM
coloserve.com
Intel Core 2 Duos
How to scale up
- Since forums don't know other forums
- Horizontally partition the db
- 5 smaller servers instead of 1
- Faster and less expensive
- No forklift upgrade
- A-L one db server, M-Z to another server
connectDb ($server)
To do this while forums are active
- Put a forum into read-only mode
- Users are able to deal with downtime/failure/problems as long as I clearly and timely communicate with them
- Make sure they know what the outage/read-only time is for: to make the service faster and more scalable
- ignore_user_abort()
- memcached - storing cached queries
- Hacker / geek friends @ college
- More technical and business friends
- Forum admins may be technical
- Recruited people from your userbase
- Incentive - their forums are hosted on my service
2 comments:
I'm currently trying out Invision Plus hosting and it seems great so far! Great job with managing the forums and you have an efficient staff to reply to any support questions quickly.
It'll be great if you could streamline the placement of all the ads on the hosted forums as not to destroy the layout or any custom skins.
Thanks and keep up the good work! Looking forward to more features to be implemented in the future.
It would be great if you would go back to the 728 x 90 google ads because the 300x250 ads really mess with the layout of the forums. They especially don't look good on darker skins. Also it would be nice if you participated more at the support forum as this assures IP users that you care about them and take IP seriously.
Post a Comment