With FM down, traffic growth at BC has been penomenal, Bob and I have both spent 20 to 30 hours a week in November and December tweaking and tuning the server and software to keep the site up. Today, we're probably going to set another record for traffic, it looks like we will break 12,000 visitors and get close to 45,000 pages. This is still less than peak loads at Storysite and much less than at FM. BC's software is flexible but CPU and Disk Access intensive compared with FM and SS; we've got plenty of bandwidth but we're flogging the server eight-to-the-bar to keep up.

The BC server is owned and hosted at a Los Angeles company. It's a multi-threaded dual-core Xeon which looks like four CPU's running at about 1.4 ghz. It has 4 GB of memory (after two upgrades) and two 250 GB EIDE drives (after one upgrade). It costs $159 a month to run.

I've been planning an upgrade to a new server which would be a dual quad core Xeon which looks like eight CPU's running at 2.33 ghz with 8 GB memore and two 250 GB SATA drives. It will cost $2400 per year to lease or I can buy it for $2700 and it will cost $1100/year to co-locate at the server farm.

Three year cost for the two plans are $7200 for the lease or $6000 for the buy and co-lo.

In preparation for doing this, I'm shutting down the servers in Texas and North Carolina which will save BC about $170 per month. I'll also get a new house connection so I can run a replacement server for the two I'm taking down here. With some offloading to a server Bob will share, BC won't suffer but this will cost about $80 per month.

My plan is to bank the $90 a month savings in preparation for either buying the new server or prepaying the first year (without prepay, a year costs $3600 instead of $2400).

If FM comes up in a week or two, I'll be able to wait six months or so to put this plan into operation because BC traffic will probably drop back to 7-8000 visitors a day for awhile. If FM doesn't come up in a week or so, I'll need to implement the plan immediately because at the rate of growth right now, we're going to hit 15,000 visitors and 55,000 pages a day in Early February and I don't think our current server and software can keep up with that. Right now, I'm having to stay up till four in the morning PT babysitting the server while Bob starts at seven a.m. ET so one of us can reboot or tweak as necessary to keep the server going.

Anyway you slice it, I'll have to put the server upgrade, when it comes, on my credit card and have BC pay me back. I'd like to keep the hit to less than $2000 so I have enough room on the card for any emergencies. That's why I'd like to wait six months before committing to one of the plans above.

I'll keep everyone posted on what's happening. If Google puts their ads back, we should be in good shape. :)

Hugs to all,
Erin