I don't know if its in the plans for this or even thought of. It seems that Neowin has some problems with sluggishness, probably due to the shear usage. I was curious if Clustering/Server Farms have been thought of as a possible solution. Its not very complicated on how to do it.

I drew up a simple schematic showing what I mean. It would involve Neowin in getting another server and both servers to have 2 NIC cards. There are other ways to do this, but I don't know if its because of the bandwidth or the hardware resources causing this, but the way I drew it up should solve both.

well... I don't know ANYTHING about servers / server farms and stuff like that, and I don't really know what NIC's are etc. but what I'm trying to sayis, neowin runs fine here.. I hardly have any problems with it, so what do you mean with sluggischness?

Well right now its fine for me, but in the past at peak usage neowin has been known to go a bit slow or give out the "server is too busy to process your request" or whatever. I have noticed myself that it seems a bit slow at times, even though at this very moment it is fine.

Yeah.. same here, but that's only a few seconds not more than 1 minute when the server is too busy. But of course if it can be more efficient, that would be a good idea, anyways that's the only problem I've ever had with Neowin

That would probably be great. But unfortunately, I think clustered hosting is *extremely* expensive.

Well having to lease two servers would be very expensive, one is expensive enough to lease. On that note, it could possibly be quite cheaper to buy/assembly your own rackmount servers and then lease rackspace. Say for example you power it by 2 Dual-Xeon servers, and then Neowin needs more power, you wouldn't be stuck with the Xeons that arn't powerful enough, simply do what every computer hardware enthusiast would do and sell the old parts (Neobay or Ebay) and buy the more powerful part. It would be worth to at least do a cost comparison for an equally spec'ed system for lease vs. own.

Neowin is a long-term prospect and will probably be around for longer than the parts that are used go obsolete, so it's not very crazy.

I think that it's clear that after all these upgrades, a single server configuration is not going to be possible for much longer, you can only upgrade so much.

I reckon it would be - seeing as the servers would need to be specifically set up for clustering, and to rent two rackmount slots worth of space and connection is no doubt cheaper than getting clustered hosting pre-done (even factoring in the initial outlay - which as you say would be smoothed out over time).

It's worth it if it helps. However, haven't we all ready done quite a few server upgrades, and it wasn't that long ago since the last one?

You could upgrade the hardware, but like I said it might not be a hardware problem and even if it were, this would still help as it would be true multitasking.

As for "cluster hosting" I colocate all my servers, and I'll cluster them, its cheap that way. With someone like RedMak I don't see why they'd need a hosting provider to 'provide' clustering for them. You can do it yourself if you have the rack space.

setup a neowin server fund
i like the idea of a 2nd server.
also if more members would use the neowin email subscription that would mean more money aswell, on the other side this would mean more traffic...

offtopc: d0tr00t..good to see you're still alive