- Oct 16, 2010
- 7,187
- 10
- 8,947
Hello, everyone.
As you may know, Anime-Sharing Project (AS Project for short), especially AS Forum, has been growing at an accelerated rate and now reached a tremendous size. Let us take this chance to once more thank everyone, contributors and visitors alike, for making this forum a safe and fun playground for all kinds of people and for giving all of us a warm feeling of pride over the community's achievements.
Sadly, growth comes at a price. In this case it is our infrastructure being no longer able to cope with the amount of traffic. We did several updates and optimized every aspect of the browsing process, but several unpredictable developments in the past months hastened the rate at which our servers became inundated with traffic to one far faster than planned. Especially the latest surge of visitors added a huge additional load on the forum.
While we did have really nice plans to update the infrastructure as we grow, they didn't include this stellar a rise. The latest surge alone brought us twice as much traffic as we thought we'd get. The errors popping up here and there on the site are a direct result of this. Therefore we are left with no choice but to upgrade as soon as possible. Specifically, in the fourth quarter of 2011.
There was already a substantial amount of money set aside for updates ($8 000 as initial investment and $2 000 in additional funds over the span of a year, bringing the grand total to $10 000), but as we were about to order the parts unforeseen events interfered once more: The flood in Bangkok caused an unprecedented rise in hardware prices, particularly for HDDs. Not only did prices skyrocket, but stock is also being sold out everywhere and people are now facing strict buying quotas of 2 disks per person. At the time of writing, we are still trying to procure as many HDDs as possible.
For all the planned upgrades we need 40 HDDs and 6 SSDs, out of which we only secured 6 HDDs to date. By cannibalizing several other systems we might be able to make do with severely limited hardware, at least until the situation improves.
We're publicizing this small message to give some insight into what is happening behind the scenes and why the upgrades are taking their time. Currently our funds will still allow us to upgrade and operate without donations from outside since we always carefully picked (and heavily negotiated) for our hardware and bandwidth.
Then again, at the current rate of growth we will sooner rather than later reach a point were AS Project will become unsustainable for us alone, and we do hope we'll be able to count on the generosity of all our members to continue the project then; to maintain and improve your favorite community, right here.
Sincerely,
the AS Staff
Checkmate, corocoro, firev1, GdragonX, girlcelly, Ignis, Ortix, Pinkylicious, Tessu, WsE, and Zero2DS.
Update: Anime-Sharing Infrastructure: An Overview
As you may know, Anime-Sharing Project (AS Project for short), especially AS Forum, has been growing at an accelerated rate and now reached a tremendous size. Let us take this chance to once more thank everyone, contributors and visitors alike, for making this forum a safe and fun playground for all kinds of people and for giving all of us a warm feeling of pride over the community's achievements.
Sadly, growth comes at a price. In this case it is our infrastructure being no longer able to cope with the amount of traffic. We did several updates and optimized every aspect of the browsing process, but several unpredictable developments in the past months hastened the rate at which our servers became inundated with traffic to one far faster than planned. Especially the latest surge of visitors added a huge additional load on the forum.
While we did have really nice plans to update the infrastructure as we grow, they didn't include this stellar a rise. The latest surge alone brought us twice as much traffic as we thought we'd get. The errors popping up here and there on the site are a direct result of this. Therefore we are left with no choice but to upgrade as soon as possible. Specifically, in the fourth quarter of 2011.
There was already a substantial amount of money set aside for updates ($8 000 as initial investment and $2 000 in additional funds over the span of a year, bringing the grand total to $10 000), but as we were about to order the parts unforeseen events interfered once more: The flood in Bangkok caused an unprecedented rise in hardware prices, particularly for HDDs. Not only did prices skyrocket, but stock is also being sold out everywhere and people are now facing strict buying quotas of 2 disks per person. At the time of writing, we are still trying to procure as many HDDs as possible.
For all the planned upgrades we need 40 HDDs and 6 SSDs, out of which we only secured 6 HDDs to date. By cannibalizing several other systems we might be able to make do with severely limited hardware, at least until the situation improves.
We're publicizing this small message to give some insight into what is happening behind the scenes and why the upgrades are taking their time. Currently our funds will still allow us to upgrade and operate without donations from outside since we always carefully picked (and heavily negotiated) for our hardware and bandwidth.
Then again, at the current rate of growth we will sooner rather than later reach a point were AS Project will become unsustainable for us alone, and we do hope we'll be able to count on the generosity of all our members to continue the project then; to maintain and improve your favorite community, right here.
Sincerely,
the AS Staff
Checkmate, corocoro, firev1, GdragonX, girlcelly, Ignis, Ortix, Pinkylicious, Tessu, WsE, and Zero2DS.
Update: Anime-Sharing Infrastructure: An Overview
