Server plans going forward

[NorCalBusa]

There are currently 1317 users online. 332 members and 985 guests.

What is the resource consumption associated with "guests"? Limiting access to nonmembers could be a short-term solution to the monthly cost issue.

I suspect many are members, just they choose to lurk rather than be visible.

[BigRich22]

You're my hero, Paul.

[Sgt Raven]

Cloudflare was in large part responsible for destroying Parler, they are not conservatives frends and I would not touch them with a 30 foot pole. Maybe see if Rumble offers the kind of hosting needed. I always gave Sundance credit for being smart. Looks like that may have been misplaced.

I know some big web sites I go to are hosted on Rumble and there is Rumble Cloud services. I don't know enough about it to say either way. But it is something Paul should look into.

[DolphinFan]

Wherever you go, whatever you do, we will be here to support the site and the 2A.
thank you

[oc16]

There will always be a market for California gun owners to talk and trade. The system is not perfect but I think most gun owners know about the Calguns website.

[user120312]

Cloudflare was in large part responsible for destroying Parler, they are not conservatives frends and I would not touch them with a 30 foot pole. Maybe see if Rumble offers the kind of hosting needed. I always gave Sundance credit for being smart. Looks like that may have been misplaced.

That's interesting. I wonder why Sundance went with them after CTH was deplatformed? It seems to be pothole-free since. Site is stable and he hasn't commented on any issues with them. I'll confirm that next time there's a private Q/A thread. I pulled the host information from the DNS records.

[2muchsoysauce4allthisrice.no-good510]

We've been running on the vBulletin cloud server now for a few months and I'm not enthralled.
The limitations are immense; I can not access any files on the 'server' or view the database, I have no way to see what our server stats are (CPU and RAM usage) and they can not tell me, additions or modifications to the forum other than the bone stock vBulletin install are not an option and basic maintenance must be done by request.

And to top it off the price increases monthly since our traffic is picking back up.
The original plan was set at 800GB/month because that's what we were at prior to the software update and move. Our first month back was 1TB and our second went to 1.2TB. Since they charge by traffic the cost they are now asking is double the starting monthly rate and will increase as our traffic increases.
Frankly what they want is more than out previous upper tier dedicated server (12-Core 24-Thread/64GB RAM) was costing. And we were seriously overgunned.

Just to be clear, this is NOT an 'I need money' post. I'm saying this to explain my next course of action.
We can be just fine doing things right rather than rushed or 'easy'. The move from GeoVario/Professional Edge to the dedicated server was rushed, GV/PE was closing and we had to move. The move to cloud hosting was easy, 'Here it is make it work for me'. Neither was satisfactory.

Frankly I was partly lazy, make it work, and partly stupid. I wanted an easy and fast fix because the problems were mounting and I was concerned the proper fix would take too much time, people would walk away and the community would die off. Given all the difficulties of the past year and a half and how many are still here despite them that was a foolish concern.

Now that the reasons are out there it's time for the plan.

I am taking us off the cloud hosting for all the reasons above and going back to a more reasonably scaled dedicated server or VPS rather than just grabbing the biggest one available at the time. Seriously, 64GB of RAM meant we could cache the entire database, the software and have spare RAM. All the server options I am looking at have at least 1GBPS lines so speed should stay the same or improve.

Right now the plan is to stay with vbulletin 6 since I have the license, it's pretty much set up and frankly there are no convertors available to switch vB6 to SMF or Xenforo. I want to do it soon but not rushed so I will post up a warning once I have all the preliminary things in place.

Please bring back itrader system

[Sgt Raven]

I think there is a compatibility problem with vB6 and iTrader.

[JagerDog]

And what the heck does this mean to the users? The back end stuff means squat to most of us. What performance, interruptions should we expect in the interim?

I would caution the "alive and well" perception. Personally, I hung on and like the site as it is. But we did apparently lost quite a few members when this place was a heap. I have no read on site sponsors, but did become aware of some disgruntlement on that side.

[Puss]

I had a, let's say, falling out with the admins. I said some regrettable things. In retaliation, they changed my username. I couldn't be happier. That said, since Bruin, the "where can I carry" hot potato is hard to track, will the real status of SB2 please stand up? ?

[riceman]

I do realize as stated this is not a request for money but had to put my $ .02 in. CALGUNS.NET has been my go-to to keep up with all the BS coming out of Sacramento, Insurance info and a lot of other info. I see there are 3 times more guest than members. Guests in the forums are great because you end up with new & diverse info. But if guests are using the Classifieds to sell something, there out to be at least a fee of some kind for providing that service or become a member. My thoughts are $5.00 per year for firearm parts and non-firearm related items and $10 - $15.00 for firearms. Gunbroker is going to charge more than that just for one sale. Just my thoughts, I do not know the inner workings here, but something has to be done because costs are always increasing.
Hell, the information I have gotten over the years is worth the membership costs.

[hmexiw]

I second all the recommendations for cloudflare - it looks like you're already using cloudflare, but it's not set up optimally. Every request from an auth'd user is dynamic, which means its hitting your origin server. With some tuning I'm sure you could get the bandwidth down significantly. Happy to help for free if you'd like any, I do this professionally.

[Kestryll]

I second all the recommendations for cloudflare - it looks like you're already using cloudflare, but it's not set up optimally. Every request from an auth'd user is dynamic, which means its hitting your origin server. With some tuning I'm sure you could get the bandwidth down significantly. Happy to help for free if you'd like any, I do this professionally.

I'd love to take you up on that but I have zero access to the server to make any optimizations, one of the major reasons I want to leave the cloud hosting with vBulletin.

Right now I'm looking at the 'Essential' dedicated server plan from In Motion Hosting. The RAM and storage look good, I am a little concerned about the 4 core/8 thread cpu not being enough but I'm told it should be okay.

https://www.inmotionhosting.com/dedicated-servers

[Preston-CLB]

Kes, many thanks for doing the legwork to find the best and reasonably priced host for CG!

Thanks also for keeping us updated on progress.
-P

[RANGER295]

That is a double-edged sword. On one hand you are probably right it would filter out a lot of the problems and take care of some of the high traffic issues. The flip side is that it would probably eliminate some of the people we want here. If we had a policy like that in effect close to 20 years ago when I joined, I would not have done that. Now I know there are a few members that would probably say they wished that were the case for me ? in all seriousness I would not have paid for a membership back then. Now in my early 40s I look at things a little bit differently and would not hesitate. That said, even now there is no way I would pay even that amount for a new community I was not familiar with. I think we would at a minimum have to have a trial membership available.