I've Been Wondering....

[Buck-Beaver]

This is a neat, important question I have been wondering about - it's probably been addressed in the past - but I was wondering how big MuppetCentral is (i.e. how much space does it take up on it's server?). What is the cost of running it monthly/annually and who pays for it? (please tell me it's not all coming out of your pocket Philip)....

Thanks for letting me be a nosy Nellie....

 

[Mark Filton]

OBVIOUSLY it is none of your business

This beaver gets no answer!!!

Seriously speaking it must be a big secret

 

[Phillip]

Thanks for the questions Buck-Beaver. It's no secret, I just hadn't had time to respond yet.

As far as the size of the site, there are more than 1000 non-forum pages hosted on the site itself with around 3000 or so graphics. More than 100,000 posts are here on the forum. On average, we do about 40 gig a month in bandwidth transfers for the site and forum.

Obviously, the costs are always in flux. However currently hosting for our own server for the site and forum is $120 a month. Our hosting use to be cheaper before we needed to make the leap to a more reliable server. Radio currently costs $30 a month for streaming, storage and licensing fees.

To avoid annoying ads or pop-ups on the site and also on the forum, we have affiliate links (Amazon, Time-Life, EB Games) specific only to new Muppet merchandise to help supplement some of the costs of hosting the site, forum, and radio. We'd be providing links to these new Henson products anyway, so the affiliates serve the purpose of helping to pay some of the hosting expenses.

 

[Buck-Beaver]

Must keep getting bigger and bigger.....thanks for the information Philip and on behalf of everyone thanks again for all the hard work!

 

[Beauregard]

Gosh, that is a lot of pages.

 

[Luke]

Originally posted by Phillip Chapman
As far as the size of the site, there are more than 1000 non-forum pages hosted on the site itself with around 3000 or so graphics.

Yeah this is something i discovered in the birthday competition - from just generally browsing around the site with the 7 non-forum sections it looks fairly compact and small but once you get clicking around and finding that one thing leads to another it's huge.

Since we are asking Phillip questions, i wanted to ask what happened to the site map (unless my memory is wrong, there was one) and the monthly poll ? I miss the poll - maybe thats something that could be kept up on the forum now.

 

[Phillip]

Originally posted by Luke
what happened to the site map (unless my memory is wrong, there was one) and the monthly poll ?

The site map was listed on the search engine pages. I always thought it was kind of messy, but if enough people wanted it back it could be added again as a link when you do a search. The search system is pretty accurate though.

The polls were taken off the news pages from a layout perspective. I agree that they served a good purpose. If you (or anyone else) wants to list a poll on the forum at any time, send me an e-mail and I will start the poll for you.