Well want to start a brain storm on what need's to be done here on AAAA to help us improve - on all aspects, the hardware, the servers, the league........
So whats bad ??
What idea's do you have ??
Do we need to upgrade ??
Well from my own views we have had our ups and downs with all of above but for now my ow thoughts to input are -:
Website well OMG that's been a pain but after a lot of teething problems from moving from nuke to Drupal think we are getting their.......
A lot was a learning curve and then the current host is limited on performance so I have had to do a lot of work a rounds to get it stable and run a bit faster.....
So at present all seems well on the site but we have already purchased a faster host with better performance but I was unable to migrate this to the new host - so many issues .
So the plans for next year are for me to develope the new host on Drupal 7 (we currently run Drupal 6) BUT their will be no impact to this site, it will be a case of my do loads of dev work on it and then migrating the data to the new site and then open it for beta testing - if it work it works if it dont it dont but we wont have the impact or outages we had last time as it will be a dev site until I get it right this time )))
So for the dedi's well again both dedis have had their ups and downs but have been stable last few months now - For capacity they seem well balanced at present but some reports of lag on Match server 1 and 2 but have not been able to find cause of that as hardware performance reporting well.
So there are many options for us and I am not sure what will best for us...........
The current model which I think has worked was to get low end box's to keep the cost down and to give us fall back - which has worked we have backup Teamspeak's and where possible clans that have a few servers have split them across dedi's.
So what next - well we aleady had some free upgrades on both box's from Gaming deluxe as we had a few hardware failures on both box's over the year
Option 1 we could upgrade the spec on both existing box's
Option 2 we could get a third box off Gaming Deluxe and balance the existing servers across all three to increase performance and give us expansion for new clans taking servers off AAAAA - think Gaming Deluxe would do us some discount as we have been with them a while now.......
Option 3 Get a third server from another provider so all our eggs not in one basket................
Option 4 Get an EU based server to try and get more EU clans onboard...........
If we go for a third server then budget would cover it but if we lost a clan and didn't get another I dont want to start running in the red again
So what ever we come up with will be a community vote so for now your own thoughts and views would be most welcome
For the budget on AAAA have some thoughts - the match servers are mainly funded from the donation support off the clans that have their own servers hosted on AAAA - some clans have not and for many reasons choose to have their server's else where an example would be our servers are based in UK so they are going to get better network hosting in their own country........
But I guess we need their support also to help pay for the match servers and community costs - I hope we can do this on a voluntary level but another option would be to make a small fee to enter the league I dont know say £2 a month and they have access to the match servers as they do now for friendlys.......... not sure about it and dont want to put anyone off from joing so guess best option would be to ask for small regular donations ????
Oh PS one thing that is working VERY well on the website is that we have had ZERO SPAM ))) I do miss the porn links though but the war against SPAM can be won The only down side is it just claimed its first victim tonight and banned NanLinda from LKW for spamming to many good mornings I am so sorry Linda but I have fixed it now