Please ATS Members and Non-Members alike, STOP Blocking Ads- Or there may be NO ATS at ALL

a reply to: theySeeme

I've got about 25 years of programming experience with 15+ in web development. I also have substantial administration experience (*nix & Windows) and a high degree of familiarity with web server and database administration and optimization.

That you think a site of the size of ATS could be hosted for $15-25 a month tells me that you're either grossly underestimating the traffic or simply have no idea what you're talking about. I don't know you and I can't say which it is.

That said, it's not simply a matter of hosting costs either — running a website the size of ATS is a full-time job for at least one person. I don't know about you but I sure as hell wouldn't volunteer that amount of time and why should I? Then there are legitimate expenses for doing business like accounting or the occasional legal fees which probably aren't large but compared to 0, what's reasonable?

Of course, why does any of this really matter? What's wrong with turning a profit?

a reply to: Stormdancer777

Oh I expected as much. Just trying to do some little part to bring awareness to the problem of blocking ads. I never paid it much attention myself, until this recent go around with all the threads about it- so I disabled ad-blocking too here. I did my part. Now back to my earthquakes and volcanoes and- my job.

a reply to: TrueAmerican

I really don't know what all the fuss about these ads is all about personally.

I have adblock and actually used it on ats as although I knew it was technically against T&C's did not realise that it mattered, I thought it was more for the ad companies benifit than anything esle.

When the changes came in I took all of 2 seconds to disable adblocker on ATS and thought "Oh well it was good while it lasted" Nothing.... not a bean unless I go to the homepage and then just a few ads down the side but I have a huge moniter and tend to zoom in on ATS so I only get the page and can see it better without the side banners.

Then someone said that the ammount of ads is based on your contributions, stars flags ect so I logged out to see how awfull it must be for those members that do not contribute as much as others and it was still not that bad, an ad every 15 or so threads on the recent list? meh...

As to those of you claiming that the creators and owners should not be earning from the site I think you need to take a step back and think about how much you would charge to build, maintain and develop a site of this size, 350k members? 2 million plus threads and 20 million plus posts? even with volunteer mods that's a heap load of time, money and effort so why should they not be doing it with a glass of fine brandy and a cigar whilst sat on a yacht moored of the coast of Antuiga?

Crack on.

a reply to: TrueAmerican

I whitelisted ATS once I realised it was against the T&C's and I have no problems at all except...I don't think I have ever read a more patronizing rant on the interwebs...ever!

originally posted by: theantediluvian
a reply to: theySeeme

I've got about 25 years of programming experience with 15+ in web development. I also have substantial administration experience (*nix & Windows) and a high degree of familiarity with web server and database administration and optimization.

That you think a site of the size of ATS could be hosted for $15-25 a month tells me that you're either grossly underestimating the traffic or simply have no idea what you're talking about. I don't know you and I can't say which it is.

That said, it's not simply a matter of hosting costs either — running a website the size of ATS is a full-time job for at least one person. I don't know about you but I sure as hell wouldn't volunteer that amount of time and why should I? Then there are legitimate expenses for doing business like accounting or the occasional legal fees which probably aren't large but compared to 0, what's reasonable?

Unreal.

I gladly openly challenge you here on ATS. We can create a topic in the appropriate section and duke it out with current and up to date information, technologies and configurations.

I'd also like to mention that this page (page 3 of this topic) is currently 14.2kb in size.

a reply to: DupontDeux

I would be perfectly happy with the answer being "nothing, nowhere, we just feel it is time to cash in in all the work we have done".

You know, although under no circumstance would I fork over even $1 to this site, I would totally respect and understand if that was the stated reason.

a reply to: TruthxIsxInxThexMist

Along with the fact, the members are ATS, so many good posters have been banned, Sorry to speak out about this , but then other good members get angry and leave.

Don't ban me bro

a reply to: theySeeme

you could.

but the site would be awful and slow with the amount of users. You'd end up driving people away with that strategy.

And you wouldn't have the level of control you'd want to have.

No to do things the right way you need to spend money on hosting and bandwidth.

I think it is a bit disingenuous to wave fingers and ridicule the members of ATS when it is the members that generate the content that brings people to the site.

It's agreed that we should disable ad-blockers, considering it is part of the T&C's, but it appears that simply disabling those extensions may not be enough to keep the site in the black. The idea of paid subscriptions has already been laid-out there to the membership.

My question is this: Where is the money going? Is the site generating enough hits to justify further investment?

originally posted by: TrueAmerican
Is that what you want? No ATS? I sure don't want that.

While things are in transition and revenue streams are figured out, the very least you can do RIGHT NOW to help is to disable any ad-blocking software. The management has said many times that this is critical to help finance the tremendous costs of running this great site. It is big and takes a lot of resources.

No, let me repeat that.

THIS SITE IS BIG AND IT TAKES A LOT OF RESOURCES TO KEEP RUNNING.

DO YOU UNDERSTAND THAT? DO YOU?

Then stop what you are doing, RIGHT NOW, and disable your ad blocking software. Simply click "Disable ad-blocking on abovetopsecret.com"

There. Now, Don't you feel better? You did your little part. And even though that may still not be enough in the long run, at least you did that. And it would also help to actually CLICK on an ad that interests you either once in a while and go check it out.

I placed this in this forum so that non-members will see this as well. Considering that some 75% or more of hits (according to management) are from non-logged in members or non-members, it would seem prudent to do so. Consider it Education of the masses that Media costs money. Nothing is free forever. Except maybe air. And who knows how long that will last either.

And to all you takers out there, yeah the ones that always just read and never or hardly ever start threads, how about considering contributing a thread once in a while? It takes that too to keep this site running. Or are you just going to keep taking and taking until there is nothing left to take? New trees have to be planted or the forest will die. So help. HELP, dammit. Stop just reading, and actually go out and get an interesting topic and bring it here, or write one yourself. Let's keep this site alive. At least, that's the way I feel. It is worth it.

It's a business dude.. and its none of yours!

DO YOU UNDERSTAND THAT

a reply to: whyamIhere

Thanks. I guess when you're feeling a bit crappy anyway and you get a bunch of people laying into you...and then the thread gets closed so you don't even get a chance to reply, it's a bit off putting.

But at the same time I am very opinionated, so it takes a lot to shut me up totally

originally posted by: grey580
a reply to: theySeeme

you could.

but the site would be awful and slow with the amount of users. You'd end up driving people away with that strategy.

And you wouldn't have the level of control you'd want to have.

No to do things the right way you need to spend money on hosting and bandwidth.

Thats not true. This website does not require keep-alive connections nor does it load much of anything outside of text. The only resource intensive feature of this website is the database and PHP - which are still relatively minimal in use in today's tech field.

If you do not have active (as in current, present) experience in the web field, you will have no idea.

originally posted by: destination now
a reply to: whyamIhere

Thanks. I guess when you're feeling a bit crappy anyway and you get a bunch of people laying into you...and then the thread gets closed so you don't even get a chance to reply, it's a bit off putting.

But at the same time I am very opinionated, so it takes a lot to shut me up totally

I sure understand, it gets old.

Never start a birther topic, lol

a reply to: TrueAmerican

I seldom see ads on this site and have never used an ad blocker. I don't understand the need to use one in the first place.

Star and flag whoring .... How classy.

Just a "Lurker" chiming in, what ads?

a reply to: rigel4

A business, that relies on user generated content is none of the users business. Sure.

If it means that much to them, that they are reaching out to users with the idea of a paid subscription, they should provide a breakdown of exactly how much the site costs to run so everyone can see for themselves.

Ya'know, Transparency.

originally posted by: Iamnotadoctor
Star and flag whoring .... How classy.

No NO, TA is just trying to be helpful, I have been here a long time, and that is not what is going on

originally posted by: Wide-Eyes
a reply to: TrueAmerican

I seldom see ads on this site and have never used an ad blocker. I don't understand the need to use one in the first place.

I guess this is one point. From listening to people I understand the experience is very different for different people. Some have so many moving adds their computer freezes up others say they see no adds I have seen it both ways on different computers I logged in on or read without logging in.

So if it is difficult for some to have their connection function with the amount and type adds they have a different situation.

originally posted by: theySeeme
40 million hits per day on a website like this could be hosted on a $10 VPS (virtual private server) with like 1gb of RAM

Since cutting costs a while back, and moving to a lower-cost metered CDN provider for all the image assets, the cost of serving our images alone is several dozen times more than your estimate. Just for our images. The outbound bandwidth of our images exceeds the typical bandwidth allotments of dedicated servers by several times.


A bit more than a year ago, we engaged a professional IT management firm to review our full stack and recommend the most cost-effective hosting option, as well as optimization strategies for the stack. Most of the code optimizations have been either tested and discarded (trying to cache mysql queries was a disaster) or deployed. And we are running on robust but relatively inexpensive dedicated server. I have a low threshold for logging slow db queries, and check it regularly... there hasn't been any for months, so the code is well-optimized.

When people say, this site could be hosted for X, they typically don't consider some of the unexpected items for sites with more than four million distinct pages. One such item is search engine bots. On some days, more than half our overall total traffic can be non-human indexing agents, and it's never less than 30%. Looking at the live log right now, of the last 100 lines of access (which represents less than the last 5 seconds of activity), 70 are indexing agents. Each of those lines of the log from indexing agents is accessing a different thread page... that alone is 70 different queries against a database of 1+ million threads and 20+ million posts in less than 5 seconds.

Using our stats, we approached AWS, The Planet, and SoftLayer for quotes on a VPS solution. No one came in under $3,000/month. Google App Engine may have been a possible alternative, but looking at the datastore and processing cost estimates, it was going to be well over $2,000 a month. So it was more cost-effective to hire a professional IT firm to customize a high-performance dedicated server specific to our needs.

Some details on the iron (we use two of these, master/slave db):
Dual E5-2670v3 processors.
32 GB RAM
Two RAID-0 arrays: one 4x 15k RPM SATA for boot/content, another 4x SSD for the database.

In front of that is a hardware load balancer (the only thing that provides the performance we need) and DDoS mitigation.

Slow query threshold is .4 seconds, we've had none in the logs for 90+ days.

Both servers typically run at a 2.0 CPU load average. During spikes, they can hit 8.0 without performance issues.