Big Chevereto Hosting for RPers at NickPic.Host

[ashkir]

Hi everyone. We're at 2,610,819 lifetime now! Growth \o/ And on the flip side...

The cost to me is now down to $22 a MONTH. If interested I can write up how to keep costs low and what optimizations worked for me.

Curious, if you could start this journey over again what would you have done differently?

Any security issues or hardware issues you ran into that could have been avoided?

1. Start using external storage, to begin with. Never save images in the same server as your installation. You want your installation to be on it's own, very strong, unstressed server. An SFTP external server is perfect.
2. Use a CDN subdomain early on, even if you don't want to use a CDN yet I would still set up a CDN subdomain now, that I would've used in the future. Would've saved a lot of headache in URL updates for myself and my members.
3. Don't use MaxCDN. I started with MaxCDN as it used to be a Chevereto recommended one. But that changed, and MaxCDN changed rather quickly and became unbearable. i tried CDN77 and they sucked and were slow. BunnyCDN seems to be the happiest medium.
4. I would've built out the randomizer feature earlier.
5. I probably would've used a shorter domain. I own like bx.rs and dot host offered me apretty awesome 1 character domain due to my site's popularity. But I don't want to rebrand. Too much hassle.
6. Clearly document any and all changes you make to the Chevereto templates. Sometimes when Chevereto updates, it no longer uses certain files, which just build up in your /vendor/ libs or elsewhere. I probably should've cleaned it long ago. I did this recently.
7. Use less custom_hooks I like the idea, but it bugs outsometime. A while ago @tomsit and I were trying to figure out why a URL wouldn't change on mine, and we realized that one of the custom_hooks even though properly set up got completely ignored.
8. I think documenting your changes is far better and far safer, as template files, and other files get updated every so often. If you document the changes you can easily reapply them without having to worry about chasing down the changed code in template files.

One thing I think is important to remember for the theme is half the theme's colorings are not even in the theme folders.

 

[rdn]

The cost to me is now down to $22 a MONTH.

- Main Server
- Remote storage server for 2.6M images
- CDN

And just $22 a month?
Not using cloudflare?

 

[ashkir]

- Main Server
- Remote storage server for 2.6M images
- CDN

And just $22 a month?
Not using cloudflare?

Cloudflare Enterprise costs me about $12 a month, it's part of the $22 🙂 Enterprise partners are allowed to use it to serve non-html primary content. The company I use for the storage node costs is about $10 a month and are an enterprise bandwidth alliance member which allows it.

The main server is completely paid off, and is in a data center, that was donated to me for life.

When my webhosting company found out I was having a heart transplant they made my main server free for 2 years:

https://www.facebook.com/bigwetfishhosting/posts/2630425336969068

Then name.com found out and they donated to my gofundme, BigWetFish turned around and gave me $300 cash and made my server free for life:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1168272435986227203

I joined them back when I was a teenager, back when they were a baby company. So I've been with them for 15 or so years now. So it really reduced my cost drastically.

@Rodolfo himself has been amazingly helpful and supportive during this time. My site is massive compared to most Chevereto and has different needs, etc. He's been very able to help us and other big sites see what's happening first, down the line so we don't have to worry about things breaking.

 

[ashkir]

Our randomizers are still by far extraordinarily popular. Our users are loving sub-albums a lot! Thanks for implementing it @Rodolfo! <3

To help our users with their navigation through their albums I added Album Heiarchies as a side bar

 

[jahrinc]

If interested I can write up how to keep costs low and what optimizations worked for me

I'm interested 🙂

Would be a pretty good read 🙂

 

[ashkir]

2,872,732 we're still climbing 😀

Keep in mind, we're one of the LARGEST Chevereto sites out there, we've been around since 2016. Our growth is word of mouth. We do NOT pay for advertising like others do. We have NO advertising like others do. We're privately funded by our users. We only have 9k users. This means nearly every user is a regular!

We have about 6,701,520 requests to our server on a daily basis. In the last 30 days 276,283,200 requests to our server (we mostly allow hotlinking) this isn't counting what the CDN is doing yet! Which is a lot more!

We are robot unfriendly, and again are a place of word of mouth growth only. I don't chase SEO rankings so please stop PMING me about it.

 

[friv]

So according to your

2,872,732 we're still climbing 😀

Keep in mind, we're one of the LARGEST Chevereto sites out there, we've been around since 2016. Our growth is word of mouth. We do NOT pay for advertising like others do. We have NO advertising like others do. We're privately funded by our users. We only have 9k users. This means nearly every user is a regular!

We have about 6,701,520 requests to our server on a daily basis. In the last 30 days 276,283,200 requests to our server (we mostly allow hotlinking) this isn't counting what the CDN is doing yet! Which is a lot more!

We are robot unfriendly, and again are a place of word of mouth growth only. I don't chase SEO rankings so please stop PMING me about it.

So according to your post ,you said: "We are robot unfriendly, and again are a place of word of mouth growth only"

Can you share with us your Google analytics for example 30 days?

And you usually receive traffic from gaiaonline.com

 

[ashkir]

So according to your

So according to your post ,you said: "We are robot unfriendly, and again are a place of word of mouth growth only"

Can you share with us your Google analytics for example 30 days?

And you usually receive traffic from gaiaonline.com

I don't use analytic software from Google, because it is a blatant violation of my users' privacy. I have internal analytics on the server with an additional set on the CDN, that are self-hosted. But, I do not wish to share them at this time. My website has a pretty solid ironclad ToS/Privacy Policy for the most part.

And my entire website's niche are role players, GaiaOnline accounts for a small portion of our traffic, but, not the majority.

 

[Hoffman]

Cloudflare Enterprise costs me about $12 a month, it's part of the $22 🙂 Enterprise partners are allowed to use it to serve non-html primary content. The company I use for the storage node costs is about $10 a month and are an enterprise bandwidth alliance member which allows it.

The main server is completely paid off, and is in a data center, that was donated to me for life.

When my webhosting company found out I was having a heart transplant they made my main server free for 2 years:

https://www.facebook.com/bigwetfishhosting/posts/2630425336969068

Then name.com found out and they donated to my gofundme, BigWetFish turned around and gave me $300 cash and made my server free for life:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1168272435986227203

I joined them back when I was a teenager, back when they were a baby company. So I've been with them for 15 or so years now. So it really reduced my cost drastically.

@Rodolfo himself has been amazingly helpful and supportive during this time. My site is massive compared to most Chevereto and has different needs, etc. He's been very able to help us and other big sites see what's happening first, down the line so we don't have to worry about things breaking.

How you got enterprise plan for $12 🙄

 

[ashkir]

How you got enterprise plan for $12 🙄

You don't have to. you have to pay for workers. Read their rules and terms a bit more. If you use a bandwidth alliance partner, you're automatically enterprise. But, you must pay for workers to serve html hits.

 

[ashkir]

3,438,388 images
81,324 albums
10,250 users

still chugging away. We're at a plateau for growth now in my current niche. I'm now the dominant image host for my entire niche. Our image growth will likely slow to be just a few thousand a month now. The server is now super sustainable for long term growth at a slow and steady pace.

Still servicing millions of images a day. I no longer use Cloudflare, and have in fact, left B2 as image hosting and moved to a dedicated server.

My website is now on a dedicated server.

 

[friv]

3,438,388 images
81,324 albums
10,250 users

still chugging away. We're at a plateau for growth now in my current niche. I'm now the dominant image host for my entire niche. Our image growth will likely slow to be just a few thousand a month now. The server is now super sustainable for long term growth at a slow and steady pace.

Still servicing millions of images a day. I no longer use Cloudflare, and have in fact, left B2 as image hosting and moved to a dedicated server.

My website is now on a dedicated server.

That is great news. But i really not understand one thing here. You have 3,438,388 images! Why you not allow the search engines to images can be indexed ? You will got blow up traffic from Google.

 

[mkerala]

Still servicing millions of images a day. I no longer use Cloudflare, and have in fact, left B2 as image hosting and moved to a dedicated server.

What happened with Cloudflare and B2?

 

[siddharth]

What happened with Cloudflare and B2?

I believe there are few disadvantages

1) B2 is not as fast as the direct FTP
2) Cloudflare won't tolerate storing images in their cache and they have banned lots of image hosts who have consumed TB of bandwidth and soon it will happen for many new comers
3) Cloudflare workers costs will go high for big hosts like him and yours

So Cloudflare and B2 won't be the ideal choice if someone plans to have host like him and yours as you guys are too big.

 

[mkerala]

I believe there are few disadvantages

1) B2 is not as fast as the direct FTP
2) Cloudflare won't tolerate storing images in their cache and they have banned lots of image hosts who have consumed TB of bandwidth and soon it will happen for many new comers
3) Cloudflare workers costs will go high for big hosts like him and yours

So Cloudflare and B2 won't be the ideal choice if someone plans to have host like him and yours as you guys are too big.

To be honest, cloudflare slowed down uploads on my site as the upload goes to cloudflare first and then to my server adding delay. Also, I don't think CDN adds much advantage if you have a good dedicated server. The few ms saved is not much if the image is above 5MB.

 

[Rodolfo]

To be honest, cloudflare slowed down uploads on my site as the upload goes to cloudflare first and then to my server adding delay.

Another issue with CloudFlare is that their IPs smells... Try it out, disable CloudFlare and you will experience traffic bump and better SEO.

 

[mkerala]

Another issue with CloudFlare is that their IPs smells... Try it out, disable CloudFlare and you will experience traffic bump and better SEO.

They kicked me out last year. And yes site has better SEO than before.

 

[friv]

They kicked me out last year. And yes site has better SEO than before.

I see now that is a true if website is on Cloudflare then you SEO is down. So i was doubt about that, but i have read this and now i see that i was in right. So what is then substitue,how to protect website against hackers if we are not on Cloudflare? I see you are now on Let's encrypt,is that solution?

 

[mkerala]

I see now that is a true if website is on Cloudflare then you SEO is down. So i was doubt about that, but i have read this and now i see that i was in right. So what is then substitue,how to protect website against hackers if we are not on Cloudflare?

I have got a firewall and most servers are isolated in internal network.

 

[friv]

I have got a firewall and most servers are isolated in internal network.

Sorry i not get you a little bit. So you have firewall activated on your example Apache server right? What you get then with Let's Encrypt more? DDOS protect too?