Podlogs has now been running for a full year and to celebrate I am running a topical blogging contest.  Since the Alliance tournement is about to kick off I figured it was the perfect topic.  I am offering 500mil to the podlogger whos blog best covers the alliance tournament.  To enter, simply tag any blog updates relating to the tournement with at8 to make sure I can read them all in one place.  For a full list of prizes check below.

• 1st Prize 500mil
• 2nd Prize 250mil
• 3rd Prize 125mil
• 2x runners up prizes of 75mil each.

Blogs will be judged on the 20th of June (1 week after the final weekend)

As you will have noticed, podlogs is in the midst of an upgrade. I started with upgrades to the core systems (wordpressMU and buddypress) and have now moved on to upgrading the themes to make more use of buddypress and am sorting out the widgets.

Once I am finished with these software upgrades I have a big decision to make with regards to hosting. You may have noticed that podlogs has become rather sluggish recently. This is in part because some of the cool new features (such as the activity stream) are a bit more CPU intensive, but it is mostly because podlogs is becoming a lot more active. Things are ok for now, but some time in the not too distant future I will have to upgrade the hosting package podlogs is currently on.

Hosting History

When I first started podlogs, the site was running very smoothly on a £5.00 a month hosting package. It quickly became very popular (around 600 blogs are hosted here) and the hosting began to struggle. That sort of shared hosting is ok to begin with, but you are on a server with several hundred other people. So if your site has anything CPU intensive you need something with a bit more guts.

The next stage up was ”semi dedicated” which with my provider costs £30.00 a month. This basically means that rather than sharing a server with hundreds of other accounts, Podlogs now shares its hosting with just a handful of other accounts. I could have shopped around a bit more at the time, but it was a pretty fair price for what I was getting and the upgrade process was 100% hassle free as their technical support team did all the work. It was around the time of the upgrade that I was forced to put the google adverts on the site to help pay for things. These have actually worked out quite well. To begin while the hosting package was surplus to requirements I was making a small loss, and more recently as we approach capacity I have been making a small profit (The ads currently bring in £1.00-3.00 per day)

Decision time

I have narrowed the field down to two options:

• I keep with the same hosting company and move to a dedicated server. The transition will be smooth, but the step up in price is astronomical. The cheapest dedicated server they do costs £115 a month (without backup, which is an extra £15 a month) Even assuming I manage to get £3.00 a day from advertising (which is optimistic) That still leaves me £40 short each month, which for a website that started out in life as a hobby is a bit steep.
• I move to a cloud VPS (VPS = Virtual Private Server) I have found a rather nice hosting company called vps.net they set you up with a virtual server that can vary its CPU power depending on what your demand is. Its a modular package, with each £15 node giving 0.6GHz of Dedicated CPU, 376MB of ram 10GB of storage and 250GB of monthly file transfer. This will allow the server to scale with the site traffic a little better and should mean that for £57* a month we can have a better server than we currently have now. The only real drawback with this that I can see is that the upgrade process will be pretty time intensive for me.

Premium Accounts

Premium accounts will cost somewhere between £3 and £5 a month. For that monthly fee you will get an advert free theme and unlimited file uploads (you are currently limited to 100mb). You will also have the option of a custom theme for a one off charge of £10.

Another option I am toying with is the ability to buy and apply your own domain names to your blog, while still being plugged into the podlogs community.  There is  a plugin out there that will do this, I just need to work out if I can get it configured on my hosting package.

At the moment these details are subject to change. I want to work out what demand will be like before I come to a final decision.  If you would be interested in upgrading to a premium account please reply to this post.

So Podlogs is a business now!?

Podlogs was never supposed to be a business venture; it has always been more of a hobby. However it has become clear that the current way of running things has a very big chance of burning a hole in my wallet when with a little work I can probably turn it around and make it a nice little side earner. This benifits you, my members as you get a better service and it benifits me with a nice little bit of income.

* £45.00 (3x nodes) + £7.50 (cpanel operating system) + £5.00 (cheap backup option, premium backup is £15)

Raging Rifter V2 Beta

All the current podlogs themes are getting upgraded in the very near future.  Before I upgrade all the themes site wide I am releasing a beta version of the new Raging Rifter theme.  This new theme is based around the podlogs homepage.  It has a sleeker more professional look, it links each post to your user profile and has comment avatars.

On top of these updates, it also has 4 new widget positions on the footer.  You can have a widget in any of these positions and the theme will automatically add a new column for it.

The Raging Rifter theme is available through your dashboard along with all the other themes.  Please take some time to test this new theme for me, it will help iron out any issues you may have before I upgrade the entire site.

To see this theme in action, click here.

I have just put a ticket in with my hosting company for an upgrade to the “semi-dedicated” package.  I am hoping this will significantly reduce load times for your blogs.  There may be brief loss of service while the switch is made, but the results should be well worth it.

Thats right, there are only four days left until the CCP Sponsored Crazykinux blog banter competition kicks off.   To enter, all you need to do is write a blog post on the following subject:

Which game mechanic would you most like to see removed completely from EVE and why?

Get your thoughts down, but DO NOT PUBLISH YOUR ARTICLE UNTIL THE 30th of June.  Save your post as a draft and post it when the competition a starts.

Here is a quick reminder of the prizes:

1st place: Gurista’s Hoodie

2nd place: Poster (winner chooses 1 amongst 3 different posters)

3rd place: EVE Mug (winner chooses 1 amongst 4 different mugs)

Honorable mention: Keychain Bottle Opener

Building on the success of his last EVE Blog Banter, with over 40 participants, Crazykinux decided to spice things up and have a little contest for this next banter, which is sponsored by CCP.

Contest Starts: June 30th, 2009 – Ends: July 6th, 2009 (end of day) :: DO NOT PUBLISH BEFORE!

Email Crazykinux for details: crazykinux[at]gmail.com

For those of  you who are unfamiliar with blog banters of the past, the format for the competition is quite simple.  You are given a topic to blog about, and you write as much or as little as you feel you need to.  At the bottom of  your post you link all the other participants, which will be available on crazykinux.com.

Articles will go live on the 30th of June. You’ll all have a week to participate by posting your article and emailing crazykinux its title and URL before July 6th, end of day. Once all the articles are in, these will be listed at the end of my article, as they always are. The deadline this time though, will be thoroughly implemented.

The judging will be done over the next few days, with the results being announced on July 13th, which should give the 3 judges sufficient time to read through all the articles (hopefully!). The judges in question will be none other than Richie “Zapatero” Shoemaker (EON’s Editor-in-Chief), James Egan (Writer and EVE Online Game Lead at Massively), and by Crazykinux Himself.

1st place: Gurista’s Hoodie

2nd place: Poster (winner chooses 1 amongst 3 different posters)

3rd place: EVE Mug (winner chooses 1 amongst 4 different mugs)

Honorable mention: Keychain Bottle Opener

What might the subject of the next EVE Blog Banter be you might ask? Read on…

“Last month Ga’len asked us which game mechanic we would most like to see added to EVE. This month Keith “WebMandrill” Nielson proposes to reverse the question and ask what may be a controversial question: Which game mechanic would you most like to see removed completely from EVE and why? I can see this getting quite heated so lets keep it civil eh?”

You may have noticed some server issues earlier in the week.  This is due to the unprecedented popularity of podlogs and the sheer number of visits we have been recieving.

We don’t have that many downloads or large images, so bandwidth is not an issue.  The problem is with CPU overload.  Measures were taken to speed the service up, and without going into too much detail a Cache system was put in place that makes a static html copy of the dynamic php pages and serves them out instead.  This has reduced the load by around 30%, and the scary “overheating” message was replaced with “semi-high” usage.

I had hoped that these measures would buy me at least a week or two, but by the looks of things I will need to upgrade to a semi-dedicated or a dedicated server this weekend.  This will take my bill up to either $35 or $99 per month which I think we can all agree is a big step up from the $8 I am currently paying for my “unlimited” shared hosting.

I will be able to foot the bill of this for the first couple of months, but if advertising doesnt start paying off a little better there is a real danger of the service either getting closed, turned into a paid service or perhaps even sold (to someone else who may or may not make it into a paid service)

What can I do to help?

Funny you should ask that! There are a number of ways you can help keep this a free service.  

• If you like the look of what the banners burried within the stories are selling, click on them! These actually pay out quite well, and could be podlogs salvation
• If you were thinking of buying an eve boxed set, but it through the podlogs/amazon affiliate store.  I get a small commission on all sales, I also have a few eve books and many other games listed
• Donate.  Yes, I know that you all signed up for a free service… but some of you might be feeling generous!  There is a paypal donate button on the right hand bar of this site, please  use it if you like this service!

Podlogs Store

Buy the eve boxed set for only £17.99. You get 60 days of playtime and if you are thinking of making a new toon, you also get a shiney limited edition shuttle.

Podlogs has managed to attract a lot more readers far more quickly than I could have anticipated.  As such, there is the possibility that I will shortly have to upgrade to a dedicated server.  This new server hardware is likely to cost me in the region of $60 a month, which I think you will all agree is a rather hefty leap from the $10 per month I am currently paying for my unlimited shared hosting.

I would like to keep podlogs as ad free as possible, so to achieve the level of service I know you all deserve I have set up an affiliate store with amazon.  If you buy from my store (and please, only buy stuff you were already thinking of buying) I will recieve around 5% comission.

Please do not make me resort to google ads!!

Lots of love,

Eddie Gordo

Podlogs is experiencing technical difficulties as a victim of its own succsess.  I dont want to bore you with the details, but the hits have been so high that I have been forced to try a more advanced caching plugin.  

Unfortunatly though the process of installing it is somewhat tricky and there may be a temporary loss of service (for example, at the moment none of the images are currently working)  I will either get this working or revert things back to their original state ASAP.