[Daniel Pumphrey]

This headphone community has become an important part of many people's lives. I was upset when I thought it was over and I am sure others felt the same.
This time I plan on putting together an email list of participants just in case. I also think this list would be useful to let people know of significant developments in Headphones, Amps Etc.
Dan

 

[Neruda]

I wholeheartedly agree. The Headwize community has to be one of the best anywhere on the web. I've seen a lot of forums that are nothing more than a stream of insults. On the whole, people who have come to headwize have been civil, intelligent people. I'm glad we can keep it alive here.

 

[aos]

Yeah, I had withdrawal symptomps since HeadWize went down, as I'm sure many did too... I knew that community was important to me but I really felt lost for a while. We must find a way to get access to vast amount of useful info in those forums, especially important for us DIY-ers. Much of that stuff is non-replaceable.

I actually did a full backup of HeadWize library and articles with some of those automated programs, fearing something like this might happen when Chu warned us first. Of course, I didn't do anything about forums and in many ways they are even more important...

 

[ThingyNess]

I wholeheartedly agree as well. I was very disappointed when I saw chu's message - we need to do something to help him out.

Having said that, 50GB/month isn't all that much. I've uploaded *checks stats* about... 920gb this month. Damn near a terabyte. I pay $26usd/month for internet access. I honestly wouldn't mind chu hosting the forums on my linux box - he can have a couple gigs of hd space and he can administer the entire box, for all I care. Unfortunately, it wouldn't be as fast as the host he's on now, i'm sure.

Oh well.. I hope we can continue headwize's legacy.
(fwiw, how much DOES 50gb/month of traffic cost? I have no problem tossing chu $20 or so over paypal, considering how much he's done for all of us. It wouldn't take too many of us helping out to see him through this, methinks.)

- Thingy

 

[aos]

50 G/month isn't much, and probably "only" costs a couple of hundred bucks ( just my guess). But if you're running it as a hobby you're not willing to pay even, say, $200-300 a month.

HeadWize has really excellent hosting, I don't recall any long periods where connection would be slow or even non-accessible. Hosting that good doesn't come totally free.

I'd said before that I'd be willing to pay a low monthly fee, but maybe there are still ways to keep it free. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

 

[Neruda]

Hey guys, check out the members list! nearly every headwize regular has signed up, and I just sent rickcr42, JMT, and joelongwood some mail telling them about this place. I think we're pretty damn close to getting the foundation Headwize community back together!

 

[acidtripwow]

Yeah, I was really bummed out when I heard about Headwize.

I really didn't know how much I went there until I couldn't get to it anymore. I hope Cmoy finds a solution and as far as money goes I would certainly pay a monthly fee or even give a donation to help him out. He has put a lot of time and work into that forum which we sometimes took for granted.
I'm really happy with this new site. Thanks Jude for your hard work and investment to keep a community like this going.

 

[rickcr42]

Man ,that was one looong week !

Never realised how much a part of my daily routine HeadWize had become until it was out of my life.

Kinda like I lost a friend

I feel WAY better now

Cheers guys

Lonely no more

 

[Neruda]

aw...

Group hug!

 

[JMT]

Don't know if you guys noticed, but the newest member is....none other than CMOY!!!!

Now, for that group hug......

 

[cmoy]

Daniel and everyone, I said this in another thread, but I will repeat: sorry for depriving everyone of their discussion community so abruptly. When I got the bill for the excessive bandwidth usage, it scared me because there was no way I could afford to sustain it. It will be another week before I can bring up the HeadWize forums and I will keep a link to this site on the HeadWize homepage until I am confident that the bandwidth usage has returned to normal. After the HeadWize forums are restored, I will add this site to the Educational Links database as an alternative to the HeadWize forums. This way, none of you has to experience withdrawal symptoms every again

 

[thomas]

Thanks CMOY and Jude for your hard work, and all headwizer's for these great discussions !

 

[ai0tron]

Yes!!, synethetic headwize. Sort of like those synthetic drugs they give to addicts to help rehabilitate them... Yeah, just as good as the real thing, rock on!!

 

[silverrain]

.

 

[neil]

Quote:

Originally posted by ThingyNess Having said that, 50GB/month isn't all that much. I've uploaded *checks stats* about... 920gb this month. Damn near a terabyte. I pay $26usd/month for internet access. I honestly wouldn't mind chu hosting the forums on my linux box - he can have a couple gigs of hd space and he can administer the entire box, for all I care. Unfortunately, it wouldn't be as fast as the host he's on now, i'm sure.

I've done a little math. Even if you transfer 20K per second (which isn't much, right?) over 31 days, that's 51 GB of data transferred.

When it comes to high-level hosting, which is required for busy forums like this one, the equation is multi-faceted. It's: bandwidth in bursts and averages, CPU/processing, rack-space (if you co-locate), data/power backup.

50GB transfer doesn't seem like all that much, but the ISPs we work with (i.e. Level3, Verio, UUnet) have different service level agreements. The agreements do not look at total transfer, they look at maximum transfer rates and average transfer rates of data. That's why high-level hosting is so darn expensive.

And no matter what, smaller and medium hosting companies ALL deal with the same backbone providers such as L3, Verio, and UU.. so regardless of what these middle-men say, they're bound by max and avg transfer rates rules.

CPU processing is another issue. head-fi.org is being hosted on a Solaris (SPARC) box with a ton of RAM. The forums can be quite CPU intensive because there are over 16 back-end database queries for every single page view, not to mention that PHP can be quite CPU intensive alone when hit hard. The ability to span and scale across multiple servers at the data center also exists.

Rack-space is quite expensive as well.

Lastly, data backup and power backup are essential. Data is on scheduled on-site backup and off-site backup, just in case stuff hits the fan. Power backup is pools of batteries + diesel.

I'm only mentioning these things because there's a very large jump between hosting a small site (i.e. on a cable modem at one's house, or with a smaller hosting company) and hosting a large/busy site (i.e. these forums) and I'm a geek that loves to talk shop.