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Oh dear! Has the NBF gone belly up again or is it just me?!


MauriceMynah

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Part of a message from Rivhard on the Norfolk Broads Forum Facebook page: "......... So I'm going to migrate the site to hosted server and give that a try. This will take some time, but it's the best solution I can come up with at the moment."

 

 

An excellent solution anyway, remote hosting on a server connected directly to the Internet spine will dramatically increase the speed and reliability.

 

It will also hugely reduce the monthly running cost and practically eliminate the burden on Richard and Gary in trying to maintain the existing heavily used stand alone equipment.

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It must be a very difficult balancing act Richard is attempting.

On the one hand, he wants the system, the control the whole lot. It's his hobby and that's what he wants to do. On the other hand it will not have escaped his notice that there is a great number of people who have come to rely on that site, and have quite unwittingly placed a heavy burden of responsibility on his shoulders I'm sure Richard never expected or perhaps even wanted it to grow the way it has.

I await with eagerness to see what happens to it now.

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It must be a very difficult balancing act Richard is attempting.

On the one hand, he wants the system, the control the whole lot. It's his hobby and that's what he wants to do. On the other hand it will not have escaped his notice that there is a great number of people who have come to rely on that site, and have quite unwittingly placed a heavy burden of responsibility on his shoulders I'm sure Richard never expected or perhaps even wanted it to grow the way it has.

I await with eagerness to see what happens to it now.

 

 

Yes, quite an understandable desire to retain total control.

 

Remote hosting doesn't reduce that freedom in any way at all though, Richard will still be free to write and modify his Coldfusion code in any way he wishes, and the site need not change in appearance or usability.

 

From the Webmaster's point of view, the only difference with remote hosting is that the owner uploads his bespoke code and data  to a server machine in a data centre, rather than a stand alone PC at their house. It then works in exactly the same way.

 

The payback is that the owner no longer requires a DSL telephone line, and can revert back to a much cheaper ADSL line, the standard ISP connection that we all use.

 

Even more importantly perhaps, in Richard's case, his own spare time after work will not taken up by these frequent emergencies trying to fix failed hardware.

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Well I can only say I wish him every success in getting things going again the task of migrating data even when it goes smoothly can take a great deal of time – especially when one is having to upload it.

 

There is a great deal of information easily accessible on the NBF which makes it rather unique and more than just a place for people to come and discuss topics with the extended time it has been down, it will be interesting to see what numbers return and get back to posting once it is back live.

 

It might be also handy (indeed for this forum too) to have a dedicated Twitter account where short simple posts on status can be sent for the wider community.

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Shouldn't be too much trouble with a DSL line, Robin.

 

Andy's quite right with that.

 

For the benefit of the non Computer Geeks reading this and wondering what it means, the difference between an "ADSL" telephone line and an "DSL" telephone line is that the former stands for "asymmetric digital subscriber line", whereas the latter is "symmetrical".

 

Most of us use ADSL, which is cheaper, but the spped of uploading to the Internet is much slower than downloading. That's fine for most end users, because when surfing the web, you send very small amounts of data, mostly hyper link clicks etc., but receive huge amounts of data, images, text etc., in the web pages you visit.

 

When you host a website directly from your home, the situation is reversed, in that your webserver PC then receives tiny amounts of data from the Internet, (just the clicks from your remote users), and yet you then upload very large amounts of data back to them.

 

If Richard is perhaps busy uploading the archive NBF data to a remote webserver, his existing DSL line will be a distinct advantage, as he should be able to upload the gbytes of data at a much higher speed than any of us ADSL users.

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Andy's quite right with that.

 

For the benefit of the non Computer Geeks reading this and wondering what it means, the difference between .....

 

Interesting Strow, cheers

 

Whatever the setup though I'm sure the hiccup has caused some difficulties and time sapping things to sort out as so often comes with change.

 

Dan

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Interesting Strow, cheers

 

Whatever the setup though I'm sure the hiccup has caused some difficulties and time sapping things to sort out as so often comes with change.

 

Dan

 

 

Absolutely, Dan.

 

A great deal of work taking many days to sort out, aside from the actual uploading time itself.

 

At least it should save even more time and effort in the future though, as well as avoiding the potentially nebular costs of very high bandwidth usage on a domestic DSL  line.

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Richard is no doubt under pressure, so all the best to him with resolving the problem(s), Im sure he will get there soon. :clap 
 
In the meantime Im enjoying reading the posts & stories on here! My good lady has been reading ALL the forums for quite a while now, but I've struggled to keep up with one!!  :???: 
 
So, at the moment I'm finding this site very easy to use, with enjoyable posts  & also very professional, plus being a bit of a NB forum addict I could stay around for a while!
.......however, only if I'm welcome! :kiss 
 
Regards
Jason
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Andy's quite right with that.

 

For the benefit of the non Computer Geeks reading this and wondering what it means, the difference between an "ADSL" telephone line and an "DSL" telephone line is that the former stands for "asymmetric digital subscriber line", whereas the latter is "symmetrical".

 

Most of us use ADSL, which is cheaper, but the spped of uploading to the Internet is much slower than downloading. That's fine for most end users, because when surfing the web, you send very small amounts of data, mostly hyper link clicks etc., but receive huge amounts of data, images, text etc., in the web pages you visit.

 

When you host a website directly from your home, the situation is reversed, in that your webserver PC then receives tiny amounts of data from the Internet, (just the clicks from your remote users), and yet you then upload very large amounts of data back to them.

 

If Richard is perhaps busy uploading the archive NBF data to a remote webserver, his existing DSL line will be a distinct advantage, as he should be able to upload the gbytes of data at a much higher speed than any of us ADSL users.

 

Excellent explanation! Just to add to this DSL is also subject to the same problem that ADSL is in so much as the further you get from the exchange, the slower your speed will be. I'm not to sure where Richard's server is but if he's out in the sticks he may well still have pretty slow speeds, just equally slow in both directions!

 

I do wonder why he hasn't at least put a holding page up with a status message, that would only take a couple of mins to do?

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Excellent explanation! Just to add to this DSL is also subject to the same problem that ADSL is in so much as the further you get from the exchange, the slower your speed will be. I'm not to sure where Richard's server is but if he's out in the sticks he may well still have pretty slow speeds, just equally slow in both directions!

 

I do wonder why he hasn't at least put a holding page up with a status message, that would only take a couple of mins to do?

 

 

Yes, an intriguing thought, why no holding page........

 

As you say, just a simple HTML page with a short text message to keep the NBF presence alive during the transition.

 

As soon as Nominet UK process the new server location at the hosting company, the existing NBF URL would show the holding page, even before  the NBF Coldfusion application is fully loaded.

 

As for the DSL line's speed, I would think that the Oulton Broad area must be blessed with a pretty reasonable Mb to have supported so many concurrent NBF users up to now. It must surely be much better than my sub 1Mb rural Norfolk connection...   :(

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It is interesting reading about DSL and ADSL (I remember ISDN) anyway...I am about to switch to BT Infinity 2, since they offer 19Mbs upload and 75 Mbs download (or is it Mb or Mpbs or Mbps) it is fast...Which will help me with sending videos up to You Tube which currently take forever.

 

I think increasingly upload speed will be more important for many people and we share and keep more data in the Cloud and obviously need to get that stuff up there to begin.  Take Flickr, great being offered so much free photo storage but with modern cameras taking larger and more detailed images each photo is several Mb in size – uploading several together can be painfully slow.

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