I'm part of a group of fans from Life On Mars fandom who are thinking about starting an eFiction-based archive. We have two different webspace accounts we could use and we're wondering which would be the best. One has loads of space (about 9 GB of free space) but a maximum traffic volume of 20 GB per month (about 1 GB being used at the moment); the other has less space (currently 800 MB of free space) but a higher traffic volume (50 GB - roughly 4 of which are currently being used).
I suspect that with the fandom being *relatively* small and likely to decline (the show ends today), neither traffic nor space requirements will be that high, but just to get a better idea of the kind of space and traffic an archive site may take, it would be nice to hear about people's experiences with their own eFiction sites in that regard.
So... how many stories do you have, how many visitors, and how much space and traffic does that actually mean?
I have 2GB space and 95GB bandwidth and I host my fanfic site with about 700 members, this site (eFiction) which has about 1,000 members, a personal site (with nothing much on it right now), and two testing sites (which obviously don't get much traffic) on that same account. I am using about 300MB server space and between 5 and 10GB of bandwidth each month. I'd say you could probably get by with either package right now. If all of your images are optimized, then bandwidth shouldn't be a problem. It's been my experience that a good chunk of bandwidth is taken up by google crawls, and if that ever gets to be a problem, you can always disallow robots.
I have 2.5 Gb of space and 50 gb a month bandwidth. My efic has 500 members and 2100 stories as well as an smf forum with about 120 members I also run a coppermine gallery with about 100 members and that has about 3000 photos in, which i suspect eats a lot of bandwidth, and i get a fair amount of traffic, but havent come close to either filling my space or capping my bandwidth, so as Carissa said, either would be fine to run a small to even large efic.
why is nothing ever easy?
url: http://www.pretendercentre.com/missingpieces/
php: 5.2.5 msql: 5.0.45-community
efic version: 3.4.3 latest patches: yes
bridges: none mods: challenges, displayword, beta-search
Not to be totally repetitive - but I agree with what everyone else has said. The site I run has around 9000 members with 1400 stories, with forums that has 500+ members. The stats say that there are around 2500 visits average daily. Before we started podcasting, we were using about 30GB a month. The skins are not very graphics-intensive, though.
We're using about 3GB of storage space, but that includes some of the owner's personal stuff, another related fansite with low traffic, the Classics Library running eFic (not very high traffic), a not-open-to the public yet Coppermine gallery, podcasts, and several email accounts that probably haven't been cleaned out in a while.
So unless you plan to expand, either one should be good.
A pure fan fiction site is unlikely to really test the limits of space or bandwidth. In fact on most shared hosting servers, if your site becomes popular the CPU usage that all the database queries consume will probably become an issue with your provider before you hit either limit
At this moment my site has 8303 members and 4082 stories. The stories are saved in files and space isn't really an issue. I have 5GB of space available but I'm only using about 500MB of it. Bandwidth isn't a problem either. According to my web stats, my site gets an average of 1168.33 visitors a day and I've only used 2GB of bandwidth so far this month. Last month I used a total of 5GB. That's just the stats for my eFiction site as I currently don't have any outside scripts installed. The biggest issue I have faced is lack of resources like MySQL on a shared server. My site was overloading the server and my account ended up being suspended from my hosting company for "abuse of resources". Of course, I was also running a fanlisting and forum at the same time which were both rather large as well. That's something to consider if anyone out there has a huge archive and has other scripts that use MySQL.
