Field Number Database - The Future

[ralphrmartin]

I guess many of you know, and even use, my Field Number database. I shall shortly be retiring from my job at Cardiff University, where it has been hosted (for free) for a long time, so it will need to move to a new server.

I hope to announce the new web address for the server soon, in a separate posting. There should be an interim period when both new and old addresses work.

However, this new server and hosting it will of course not be free. I'm wondering what to do to help pay for the costs, which can be broken down into (i) the server hardware, (ii) monthly costs of a fast upload speed broadband connection, (iii) electricity.

Just to give you an idea of the amount of traffic, I serve up over 1/2 million pages per year from the database.

(1) I could put Google ads on each result page, and hope they would occasionally be clicked.

(2) I could solicit donations with a Paypal button, letting users donate as much or as little as they want.

Currently, the plan is to use a cheap (and slow!) Raspberry Pi as a dedicated server, but

(3) I could make a specific one-off appeal for donations to fund a more powerful server which would also be easier to back up.

So, what I would like to hear from everyone is their opinions and suggestions on what I should do, apart from the other obvious answer of "fund it all yourself out of the goodness of your heart".

Any other realistic, specific, ideas than the ones above are particularly welcome.

Thanks. Ralph

[KarlR]

I've used your database quite a lot over the past couple of years. It's an extremely valuable resource in my opinion!

I would hope this might be something the Society could look into help funding.

[jfabiao]

Have you considered the possibility of renting a server for this purpose, instead of setting up one yourself? There are companies selling this service everywhere and it may be worth looking into.

[ralphrmartin]

Have you considered the possibility of renting a server for this purpose, instead of setting up one yourself? There are companies selling this service everywhere and it may be worth looking into.

Yes, I have, but there would still be costs*, and it would be somewhat harder to manage. You also may be limited in what terms of what software, and version of that software, is available, what control you have over it, amount of traffic permitted, and so on. Overall, it would be less convenient and straightforward.

* Although I have had an offer from someone to share their server, which I am considering.

Another idea someone privately suggested is rather than to have advertising as such, is for some well known nursery (nurseries) to sponsor it somehow, and have a message acknowledging their support.

This could be in addition to society sponsorship as suggested above.

Anyway, thanks for the suggestions, and keep the ideas coming.

[FaeLLe]

Ralph I am happy to discuss hosting options with you (ps. I do not sell them) on the Cloud.
If you architect the applications correctly then you could spin up the required resources on demand and offload the costs on a per transaction basis.

Depending on current workload demands it could be cheaper than the operational costs of having an always on and available server.

Don't know what your appetite for transformation is though

[Keith L]

My web site is hosted by a third party and the cost is to my mind surprisingly modest. Having had two major problems with Fasthosts I moved to Webwiz two years ago and very pleased I did so. But they are Microsoft based and I expect you use open source so would need another provider.

i use an Access database which I think you also do, but Fasthosts objected to the occasional heavy load the queries put on the server, so I modified the way it works and pre generate the web pages which also gives a much faster response to the user. But you would presumably need to run live queries. Perhaps with more powerful servers and other technology advances this might not still be an issue.

With Webwiz they give a short free period to try out their service and being fairly small I had good communication with them to sort the issues which arose. Maybe there is an open source ISP equally helpful.

As to cost, what about offering advertising to companies associated with the hobby, as Cactus Mall do?

Regards

Keith

[ralphrmartin]

Thanks FaeLLe for the offer of a cloud based solution. I don't think I need the scale of "spin-uppable resources". Demand is fairly consistent over time, and readily handled by single machine. (The current solution runs off my desktop at work which I also use for my day job).

I don't really want to have to reconfigure the way I am doing things, and ideally, want things I can mange myself, rather than having to "call support" if something stops working at the other end.

[ralphrmartin]

Thanks for the comment Keith. My current solution is based on a MySql database with php + phpmyadmin on a Mac. I dont know enough about MS products to move it to an MS based solution, but have already got a version basically working on Linux. Again, the main point is not where to host the database, but how to raise a modest amount of funding to help pay for running it. I'm certainly not trying to make a profit here, but it would be nice to cover the running costs.

To put it into perspective, let's pick an arbitrary (but reasonable) figure, say £100 a year. I think you can all now see why it is not worth me spending a lot of time and effort to extensively modify my current solution to host it elsewhere.

I suspect there is limited cactus-related advertising available and I certainly don't want to spend a lot of time chasing (and spamming?) possible advertisers, so I would probably go for some program like Google Adsense if I go down the advertising route. It would serve up targeted ads anyway.

[ralphrmartin]

Here is another idea someone privately shared with me. Users could pay for each lookup. Of course, this would be tedious to do per lookup, so you could buy "credits": £1 would buy you a certain number of lookups (perhaps 1000), and when the credits ran out, you would need to buy some more. Larger amounts could offer more generous numbers of lookups, and there could be an "unlimited option" where you pay say £20 just once to get unlimited lookups.

It would be tricky to decide what a sensible number of lookups would be for the money. I am sure that using such a system, the number of lookups would drop very much from the current number, but hosting costs are relatively independent of the amount the server gets used.


I'm not too keen on this though for various reasons
- I would have to implement the charging mechanism, and as discussed above, I really don't want to do a lot of work to transform the system from its current state. Even if I could find some suitable library and link it up with paypal, this sounds like a serious amount of work
- paypal is not widely used in places like China
- many people who have given data freely to me might be upset at the thought that I am "selling" it (even if I am only recouping costs in providing it)
- many fewer people would use the data
- this would not work for other sites which have deep linked to my data (all their lookups would appear to come from the same user)

[Jim_Mercer]

Is this something that could be included in the revamp of the BCSS website?