2009

You'll notice that lately (and for some time before) I haven't been around a great deal, especially poor old Riven who does a stirling job of managing our public face while i'm away drunk or under arrest for pig rustling (not really). Anyway, come 2009 i'll be finished with my degree.. but starting post-grad studies + an extra language, so time will be at a premium. Thus, I am leaving the floor open for someone to step up and offer solutions for hosting the site. I am happy to renew our Globat (Slowbat, more like) hosting until 2010 as it's dirt cheap - doesn't it show - so we have a grace period to sort out alternative arrangements, if people want them.

The long and short of it is

a) Do you want to move hosting, if so, we would need someone with finance and time to manage a transition
b) Any other questions, stick 'em here.

I hope you all had a merry christmas in spite of the worrying times with jobs and money across the world - community such as ones own family or even internet based groups are more important than ever to keep a smile on your face! So 2009 will be another year on the bedpost for the Pit, we just need to steady the hosting ship a wee bit, too.

I suggest Surreal Media as a host. They were my hosting company for my site and I am looking at going back to them here real soon. They have a great 24 hour support staff, and all the bells and whistles needed for a great site. http://www.surreal-media.com/

If you need help let me know.. If Larchy will continue on as the web site manager, making it spiffy and code and all that jazz... I will see what I can do to get us a few years of hosting with them. Im not rich, but I am more than willing to do my part of keeping the pit alive and well.

You all have done so much for me and my mapping skills, It is the least I can do to help keep this site around for others to have the same benefit, and pay it forward.

Sorry Double Post.

RIVEN and I were chatting and he said he uses http://www.hostgator.com/. If we pay for 3 years of hosting in advance it is just $4.95 ( US ) a month. Maybe something to look into.

How about we set up a SnarkPit PayPal account, and ask for donotions. See if Larchy would not mind the handeling the transition of the pit... I default to him since he is the most familare with the PIT, its size, bandwidth and so forth.

I am sure many of us would donate to see a better more active stable site.

Thanks for posting that for me Muhnay; I didn't have time earlier to mention it. I appreciate it The Hostgator plan might be opportune in that, it offers all you can imagine for the website. Here's a demo for the Cpanel they use. The $4.95/mo is almost as cheap as Globat's deal, and they have a 45 day money back guarantee! If time isn't on our side for the imminent revival of our Globat account, then you can have an extended stay online with Hostgator. The problem will be finding that kind of money: (4.95)(12*3)=$178.20 upfront!

(yea BTW, they sell you on the fact that it's $4.95/mo, but when you go to check out, it's only that for three years in advance. It actually won't say "Three years in advance" anywhere on the site if you're looking for it :/ -Just so ya know.) But be sure to check out what you're limited to or unlimited to as well in the little chart they have setup.

-Now as far as whether we need a new host or not, that's up for the individual Snarkers to decide I think. We already know Larchy, the site designer has trouble getting onto it which limits the amount of fixes over time, and I know a few have reported problems every now and then about surfing through the site. I know it hangs for me every now and then, but it's always been like this. I am in favor of a new host and am willing to make a donation. Let's hear if others would either like to donate, or simply state whether the Pit has given them trouble in the past. If we get any objections, we can discuss it a bit.

How long do we have before the Globat account needs to be renewed?

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Blog: www.playingarchitecture.net
LinkedIn: Eric Lancon
Twitter:@Riven202

I will kick in some as well. I was thinking of donating the entire amount to get us started. But I am also looking at getting a new web page for myself. Now if Riven wants to kick in some I may make up the rest if no one else wants to donate. I feel this site is a legend in mapping and should not be lost to those other sites who came along far after we did.

I am hoping LARCHY stops by and tells us what he needs and what he thinks since he is the Snarkpit resident GNOME twisting the flux cambine, and tightening the micro condenser and tweeking the robust conflabotor.

There is a big review site that covers most hosts here

If you want a laugh check out the section on Globat

A good ones seem to be ICDsoft ($10 month, plenty of space and bandwidth) or lunarpages ($4.95 a month, unlimited space and bandwidth, great reviews), but there are also a bunch of others.

Yes I'm more than happy to keep working on the site as I do enjoy the project, although recently I've been too busy to be able to do much plus I still can't get any access to the site except via proxy. This also precludes safe use of FTP which means that I can't make any major changes.... it's really annoying. I should have some time in the new year to do stuff though (and work through Riven's list of fixes), and was hoping to do some stuff over the coming week - been working on a new theme!

Anyway, basically what we would need would be any PHP/mysql server. PHP5 would be good, and 99% of hosts now use this. Globat are still on PHP4 which isn't too big a deal but limits the code in certain places as various newer functions aren't supported. Globat doesn't have an xml parser either, and that coupled with PHP4 means we can't have any AJAX stuff, which again isn't a big deal but might be nice to have when uploading maps and stuff (eg we could have an upload progress bar when uploading your stuff). All this is basically standard on any host these days, as are things like the GD libraries... you'd have to look really hard to find a host that didn't have any of that. The server configs are probably gonna be different, but that's just a little bit of code tweaking to get things working.

We would have to move all the content over which would take a while to upload & download, but again that's not a big deal as you can just set an ftp client running and leave it... I can probably arrange for that on a connection that can actually access the site if needs be. Tbh I would take the opportunity to reorganise the content as it's something that I wanted to do originally but didn't dare attempt given how fragile the current hosting is and it would involve moving GBs of files around... originally the site was set up so it saves maps to folders with game initials, eg HL, HL2, COD, UT etc, and all the hl mods go in the HL folder etc. This is problematic not only from maintaining a sensible correlation with and within the database, but it means we have mods like CS:S mixed in with everything else from the HL2 folder... people have complained about the maps page being badly organised, but it's a result of this games>mods hierarchy, and makes rationalising the content difficult. I have the scripts written that will basically give every mod it's own entry in the database, eg 1 - Halflife, 2- Sven Coop, 3-Portal, 4 - Zombie Panic, 5 -AHL, 6- whatever etc etc and move existing stuff into folders 1/2/3/4 etc from their current places... and I posted a screenie in the relaunch thread of the maps page redone on the back of this reorganisation where you can just easily select any game or mod from this single list... if we were gonna move the content over to a new host it'd be an ideal time to do all this as I could do it locally, make sure it's all working and then upload to the new host.

Database export... globat is an arse and exporting the current db is problematic because of some server side settings, but again its nothing I can't get around and I already have most of it backed up anyway. It's mainly the table with all the posts IIRC as it's too big to export because of limits imposed by globat, but I can just export it piece by piece and reassemble it.

If you have the opportunity to change I certainly would because the reason the site is so slow and often inaccessible is the atrocious hosting. They aren't even using Apache servers - this is still a CGI setup, vintage 2001.

I'd even be willing to put up some cash towards it... if a few peeps bunch together then it shouldn't cost too much amongst us all. Of course with Mr Brown in charge Sterling may not be worth all that much in a few more weeks :P

omgomg site works without proxy RAWWRR!

Gwil - you changed the ftp password? pm me the new one pweease?

YAY LARCHY! Great to hear from you man.. hope you had a great Holiday!

Ok lets settle on a host, and a date we want to pack and move.

Hey Gwil, larchy! Congrats on the new site.

I'd donate a couple of bucks for a new host.

Well I think that lunarpages is the same price as Globat tbh

When does the current hosting run out?

Not til 2010 now, I renewed it for about £40 to give us some leeway on deciding where/when to move (as I imagine it will take a bit of deliberation)

I'm happy to give a wadge for a share on lunarpages, their review looks excellent on WHJ!

Well hostgator (as Muhnay mentioned above) has great reviews too... so that or lunar as they're the same price by the looks of things... although lunar is $4.95 just for 12 months so paying might be easier. Tbh if its $60 then that's about £40, so pretty cheap - can we split that up between a few of us? I'll chip in.

What about the domain name (snarkpit.net?) Is that paid up? Who is it with? Easy enough to update the name servers to point to a new host?

Also, looks like I have most of this week free \o/ so will try and get some stuff done

Its a shame that I don't have PayPal or a credit card or anything like that otherwise I'd certainly try and donate something. But I think its really great that somebody so busy is able to continue to pay for this site and hire a web designer who created this new Snarkpit that continues to improve.

As for moving to a new host, I think it would really be nice. I myself have had a few problems with the slow loading times and if we want this site to expand and dominate we really need to do something about the reliability and speed, and the links page :P.

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Aaron's Stuff

aaron_da_killa said:
Its a shame that I don't have PayPal or a credit card or anything like that otherwise I'd certainly try and donate something. But I think its really great that somebody so busy is able to continue to pay for this site and hire a web designer who created this new Snarkpit that continues to improve.

I think you let something slip that you weren't supposed to there

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Just Kidding

Just Kidding

I did :-o? Where?

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Aaron's Stuff

I'm happy to go with lunarpages. As for the domain, I get the feeling its registered with Globat although the whois also flashes up GoDaddy. All useless information from me atm, my head is scattered in a thousand places! Gonna check up on it now