we talkin' donation time agains??

Damn ! I was just in the proccess of uploading a new mix for March. Oh well, ye can still get it at www.beatonic.co.uk . btw Naz, you can still post it here and link direct to beatonic if ya like.

I'll give to the cause, just tell when and how much?

To be fair the mixes are of such high quality you could buy them in the shops and think you got a good deal for a tenner.

theres a donate button here that goes directly towards bandwidth. I wanna try a different solution next month and solve the bandwidth problems once and for all. whatever that is.

Duz that mean I might be able to get this clamp unhitched??

:-)

lets go through our options here, I'm interested in hearing your opinions on this.

1)Cap in hand. we can use user donations when the bandwidth cap is hit monthly. The problem here is that b00mb0x is a weed and grows at an every increasing rate. Essentially, we've tripled our bandwidth overheads since the last throttling. This is going to happen more and more and earlier each month as we have a fixed cap.

2) Selling Out. We can augment the site with permanent paid fast hosting accounts. This would involve the mixer paying a yearly fee (or a per mix fee) to have their mixes hosted on permanent fast servers, with the proceeds been used to fund doubling the present bandwidth/ This solves the archive being down for folks with accounts but it introduces an overtly commercial aspect to the site. mixers become customers in a way. when money's involved, stuff can become hairy, and this has always been a hobby for myself and the tall guy from NYC.

3) The third man. We can bring in a third administrator, split the costs three ways and double the bandwidth cap by upgrading to the next plan. Assorted and I need to really get along with this guy.

4) Using Bittorrent. Bittorrent is a p2p swarming client that would signifcantly reduce our bandwith because downloaders will also be uploading to others. This does not cost anything but if we started seeding torrents this coulod alert the host to us and potentially getting the site shut down. changing hosts can be tramuatic affairs, and lots of people use b00mb0x as their email address. A couple of folks have suggested this.

5) Seeding the complete site with ads. Check the blog for a demo. Not exactly pretty and whether it would cover overheads is debateble. Could also be used in combination with other solutions.

6) Downscaling. We could host mixes for a fortnight or a week. This buys time, but reduces whats on offer.

7) Your suggestion here

So, let me know what you think if you have an opinion

As I understand, this whole b00mb0x gizmo was initially set up by Naz and Assorted as a fun thing for their own personal do-wops.

I'd say, for the sake of the site's originators, let's keep it nice and easy and FUN for them, not create some kind of quasi cottage-industry that's gonna become more like work.

Saying that, I'd like to say that I'd prefer the donations method since it goes directly to the webhost and, I think, all Naz and Assorted have to do is post up the mixes and sweep up the place from time to time.

It seems that this would be effective if we could know where we are on the bandwidth quota and get a head's up about needing some donations, but won't that create extra work to do so?

im setting up a u/p so people can monitor the bandwidth now. Its a rough indicator mind and is subject to a 160 GB a month cap. It uses calendar month, whereas we flip over billing around the 22nd of each month. so with those privisos the u/p is b00mb0x/stats and you can access it via http://mixes.b00mb0x.org/stats

thanks for the opinion, I'd like to hear some others too :)

Seen the new offer on DreamHost? Sign up today (St Patrick's Day) and get triple the bandwidth for a single price, FOREVER.

Been a longtime visitor to this site and have just uploaded my first mix. I'd be very sad if it all went kaput. Don't know the solution, but I'd be sad if it all went byebye.
Promise to donate soon.

yeah we signed up for a similar promo in december, this be the tripled package. b00mb0x wont go kaput, at worst It'll be scaled back :)

get yer cap out...

give us an idea of how much money u need per month.. i'm willing to lash what i can. and i thinks there's enough ppl regulary uploading mixes to also contribute.

i recons between us we can help b00mb0x not to resort to u having to sell advertising space!

i like the bit torrent idea. maybe a combination where people have the option of using the torrent if they're down with them, or a regular download link if they're intimidated by torrents or whatever. seems like that would cut your bandwidth significantly. not sure what you mean about problems with your host if you seed the torrents, though. what if you had the torrents on a separate tracker - would that help?

for what it's worth, i use surpass hosting for my site, and get 200GB of transfer per month for $25 (13 quid), though that's not been enough to keep up with the downloads lately ...

thanks for the comments. we currently get 192 GB with 160 allocated to mixes( we have other site) for 19.95 a month. Theres also a new factor to consider here, the archive server will not be back in its old form - assorted running it from his bedroom, so we'll need a solution for that too.

8) Registration - We could introduce registration the se, making the downloads available to registered members. This would probably cut deman a little or a lot, depending on how lazy people are.

registration's a good one

message from our hosts

In case some of you didn't know, DreamHost does not allow the use of
BitTorrent software on it's servers. The reasoning behind isn't that we
have anything against bittorrent (heck, most of us use it ourselves). The
problem is that with the amount of bandwidth at our disposal, the trackers
simply end up handling too much data and eating up far too many resources
(both CPU and bandwidth) and end up affecting the level of service we can
offer the other people on our shared hosting servers.

We have been researching the possibility of offering a public tracker
service, but it's still in the very early research stages and may not be
something we can offer.

So please, for the sake of everybody who has to share their resources with
you, refrain from running bittorrent software on your accounts. If we
catch you running one we reserve the right to shut it down with no notice.

Happy Dreamhost Tracker Tracking Team!

oops two people donated, what with paddys day and everything i didnt notice. I've unthrottled the site, thank you guys.

As a relative newcomer to the site, I have to say what a musical revelation it has been to find similar minded people with some great musical ideas.

I want to be part of it and am looking forward to submitting a variety of mixes for everyone's pleasure, hopefully giving back some of the fun that you peeps are giving to me!

Whatever way we do it, I want in and am prepared to steal from my mutha to assist!

Good work guys!

This is simply the finest home for wonderful music delivered with imagination and love. Lets keep it simple guys: How much & how often?

assuming the status quo continues, when the throttle is reached the price is 50 cents per Gig of overage. A days bandwidth is 3-10 GB, depending on the amount in the mixes folder and how new the stuff on the front page is.
A fresh block of 160 GB rolls over on the 22nd of each month.

Thats how it is right now, when assorted gets back online this week we'll see what else we can do, whether we can do some things differently and how to get the archive back online. Thanks for the support during these growing pains :).

actually the billing cycle flips on the 19th, today. I've upped the throttle to 210 GB for this month and I'll post some new mixes tomorrow!

hurrah :D

quick! flood the ftp! :D

Just a thought - I know that plenty of us use soulseek (and other p2p progs too no doubt). How's about putting your name on a mix once you've downloaded it & say "grab it from me on slsk instead of from here if you want to".

Or compile big list of people who regularly use this site and what p2p programmes they use. e.g. "I use kazaa & soulseek & limewire and my username is yadda yadda". Everyone's still getting the same mixes, but from each other rather than direct off the site.

It's a slightly more roundabout route for getting the mixes, but it's possible. I'm pretty certain my download / upload limit is uncapped, so I'd be happy for people to be grabbing stuff out of my b00mb0x folder on soulseek 24/7.

the soulseek thing is probably a good idea.

i just noticed , there's been 4 mixes uploaded that are bigger than 100 MB this month. It's one of our only rules regarding mixes, and I'm not posting any of these because it involves me downloading, reencoding and uploading the mix back again at 10 KB/s. Plus it says it in the FAQ and in the upload folder. 100 MB should be plenty

based on the level of support we've had with our bandwith, we'll accept up to 125 MB per mix from now on. Not 126 MB tho. hehe

aaaaaah wonderfull :D

again, because of the recent support, we've doubled our bandwidth allocation and disk space. This is enough for the archived old mixes to come back. it will be behind a password, given to mixers and folks that donated. we'll eventually burst through those allocations but not for a while hopefully and we can cross that bridge when we come to it. well reup the old mixes to the new space when we have the time and the bandwidth, but it should be relatively shortly. We've been taken aback by the level of support you've given, and this is the result of it.

Excellent! I only got here in November, and I have several people's archives to ransack.

yep,theres a few old ones i've missed out on which i'm looking forward to grabbin' :D

ramo istanbul