why does this site go down so much considering how much money it makes?

[yo]

why does this site go down so much considering how much money it makes?

no other website that I have visited in the last 10 yrs or so, has this issue.

[Tygo]

Because shit happens, my friend.

[ze_stom]

How much money do you think the site makes?  By my count- it's not all that much considering the amount of traffic it supports.

 

On Wednesday, January 9, 2013 8:45:22 AM UTC-8, yo wrote:

[CrankyPants]

Other websites you visit probably don't contain this much data and custom code.  And those that do have a whole lot more money behind them.

I do wonder why they don't run a hot-hot failover cluster and outfit the secondary node with slower disk/older equipment.

[leroy43]

I once worked for one of the big high tech companies and did solutions design for various sized enterprises. Even a simple failover system is more than 2x the cost of a non-failover system. Although most clients said they wanted highly available clustered systems, it's only the really big customers who are doing thousands of transactions a minute where the costs of being down is substantially greater than the cost of the failover system that bought them. 

[Ken Bradford]

This is absolutely correct.  Think Ed Norton in Fight Club--"If the cost of X, plus Y, plus Z is greater than the cost of a recall?  We don't do one."

"What auto company did you say you worked for?"

"A major one."

[abrannan]

Yeah, after overhead they can basically support what, 3-5 employees (if that many)?  And they're running on a code foundation that they wrote, not some out of the box enterprise system.  Downs happen.

[ze_stom]

Even companies with massive backups and fail-overs go down.  Citibank was down twice last week as well as over xmas. 

 

Keeping tier 1 architecture running would cost BGG substantially more than they make/year. My company is highly available and it takes a legion of hundreds, if not thousands of people to support the system (along with millions of dollars on an annual basis) to ensure that we are up all the time. 

 

Heck, even gmail has outages. 

 

On Wednesday, January 9, 2013 8:53:27 AM UTC-8, brad....@gmail.com wrote:

Because sites do go down, especially those with as much traffic as this one gets. You have tens of thousands of people posting, downloading rules, posting pics and just generally sucking the bandwith by looking at stuff on the site, it's bound to have a hicup now and then. And with the money, the only way they get money is probably from sponsors and drives i think right? I don't think they make nearly enough for what they do to keep us into the games as we are with the site.

[Shatner]

A positive way to phrase this might have been:

"Why does this site not go down more often consider the shoestring budget they run it on?   No other website has the amount of valuable information and community that this does."

[Leonithic]

Being positive? Addicts without their fixes can't be positive. :D

[RideTheory]

On Wednesday, January 9, 2013 9:30:13 AM UTC-8, Shatner wrote:

A positive way to phrase this might have been:

"Why does this site not go down more often consider the shoestring budget they run it on?   No other website has the amount of valuable information and community that this does."

Ravelry has 2 million users, a complex database of users, their profiles, their projects at various stages of completion, communities, available knitting patterns, yarns, etc, and it is very seldom down. 

BGG may have a more complex back end, but the demands on it are from only 400,000 users.

[orionstars]

In my opinion if you don't like the service/benefit ratio - then stop using the site completely. You can view ads anywhere. Visit the online retailers by going right to their site. So delete your BGG account and don't use any of it's resources anymore. 

If you don't like this freely available, massive, community built with no financial compensation, platform for OoP game information and launch pad for new ventures, smart-phone/tablet/computer accessible, creative gaming resource - bow out. 

(By the way - take the challenge, I did it myself. I stayed off the site for quite awhile to see if I really made use of it. It didn't take long for me to run into the issue of not being able to find the rule answers and variant info Anywhere else. So I'm not talk from a point of ignorance here. I took a spoonful of my own medicine.)

On Wednesday, January 9, 2013 10:53:40 AM UTC-6, Travis Sonsalla wrote:

Agreed.  This is exactly why I am more than willing to view their advertisements but not be a patron.  They are a business, and to have such a history of repeated unplanned outages comes across as unprofessional.  I wish BGG the best, but earning my financial patronage will require a consistently stable and available site.  Just like I would expect from any other web site I choose to support financially via subscription or donation.

[ImaginaryRoot]

The site is run by a minimal team based on code they wrote and servers they pay for and manage. The team also (correct me if I'm wrong) makes this their full time job, so some of the money they get has to go to supporting themselves in life.

Other websites may have huge data centers, or they rent out massive enterprise style racks with tons and tons of bandwidth and redundancy.

BGG can't afford it unless people spent much more money. While the site has expanded so has their capabilities. However, things still just happen.

On Wednesday, January 9, 2013 11:45:22 AM UTC-5, yo wrote:

[ralpher]

I blame War of the Rings second edition having its own game entry. If they used families for games rather than separate entries every time a new edition came out, the database would be more stable.

[leroy43]

For every problem there is a solution that is simple, elegant, and wrong. :)

However, I do agree that I'd like to see game families similar to what's over on the RPGGeek side so that all editions of War of the Ring (to cite but one example) could be clumped together.

[Travis Sonsalla]

I made no mention of disliking the service/benefit ratio.  I simply said their ongoing unplanned outages holds me back from wanting to donate financially.  No hard feelings toward anyone at BGG, but these are my expectations as a potential cash-paying customer.

The tired argument of "go somewhere else if you don't like it" is irrelevant.  I support them as a viewer of the advertising but won't support them financially until service is reliable.

[jayntampa]

I like this site enough to use it but because they don't have the funds to stop it from going down I refuse to be a supporter and provide the funds to stop it from going down.

What?!?

[Sagrilarus]

    They blow all the money on Warhammer Miniatures.  The website's running on a Dell Laptop that one of them "borrowed" from work in 2004.

On Wednesday, January 9, 2013 11:45:22 AM UTC-5, yo wrote:

[Sequella]

On the contrary, the suggestion to empower yourself to find better cost free board gaming resources is in fact completely and primarily relevant. You don't "support them as a viewer", such a concept only exists in the mind of a narcissist. Your visits of their web site does not benefit them in the slightest. There's also no such thing as a 'potential cash paying customer'; it's a smoke screen for you to complain. Another fanciful argument from a self-entitled point of view.

The reality is you won't go somewhere else because BGG provides a free resource to you that you found beneficial, but without the gratitude that should be the obvious response. Leeching resources doesn't make you valuable. In fact, it doesn't even make you relevant.

[jayntampa]

No, that's the only way to have the site shut down or provide less features :p Even my HUGE bank shuts down an hour a day ... It's not a big deal.

[Chris Funk]

You know, for as much value I've gotten out of the site over the last 6 years, I'll forgive some occasional minor outages and I don't mind giving them money to support the site hardware, the employees, or the multitude of other costs incurred by pulling as much data and traffic as BGG does. Whining that you wouldn't throw a pittance at them because it may be down for a short period every couple months is a pretty shallow viewpoint...

On Wednesday, January 9, 2013 11:45:22 AM UTC-5, yo wrote:

[Mary Rudis]

Haters gonna hate... creepers gonna creep.

I will double my support in 2013 from 2012 level. Starting NOW for every trip to the coffee shop I give up, I will put the equivalent funds into a jar. At the end of the year, the total goes to BGG.

[JHINRICKSON]

Wow, you internet provider goes out once in awhile I'm sure - do you stop paying them.  Or are you pirating you internet connection?

On Wednesday, January 9, 2013 10:53:40 AM UTC-6, Travis Sonsalla wrote:

Agreed.  This is exactly why I am more than willing to view their advertisements but not be a patron.  They are a business, and to have such a history of repeated unplanned outages comes across as unprofessional.  I wish BGG the best, but earning my financial patronage will require a consistently stable and available site.  Just like I would expect from any other web site I choose to support financially via subscription or donation.

On Wednesday, January 9, 2013 10:45:22 AM UTC-6, yo wrote:

[yo]

cool they will have even more profit to spend on things other than the website

[jayntampa]

Yo - how much "profit" do you think BGG generates? I think you'd be surprised ...

I mean, you do know what profit is, right? It's revenue beyond expenditures, not simply the gross income.

[DainHarper]

IMO just 10 days into 2013 and the uptime has been pretty poor.  Yes, uptime costs money.  You know what, downtime costs BGG as well.  The typical response so far of 'Its free, you have no right to complain' or 'if you dont like it go elsewhere' is nonsense, because:

* There are larger sites (with more users/content) and better uptime.

* It wasnt free, I have paid money (as a buyer/seller and as a patron).

* When someone raises a concern, we should answer the concern, not tell them to **** off.

If downtime is required for site maintenance, schedule it.  An hour a day would likely go without issue, if we all knew in advance when it was.  But sure, act like a spoilt internet child and label everyone who disagrees with your position as a 'hater'.  That helps.

[ಠ_ಠ]