DR KOH

just sharing…photography, car, IT, computer, ocean engineering, God, Christianity, life…

PhotoMalaysia…

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 Got quite upset over PhotoMalaysia recently…first is the slowness of the site…which I still don’t understand why it becomes slow with small number of members online (average 80 members and 100 guests), and around 9000 registered members. Even during off peak hours, the database connection seems to be slow as well.

Is the problem due to vBulletin software? Or the setting of our server or database? As having no control over the technical part…I feel frustrated. Hope to grow PhotoMalaysia and make it as good as possible, but many things are not within my control. Removing more and more information from PhotoMalaysia website to speed up the thing isn’t the solution IMO, eg. who’s online is of very interesting to me.

Currently paying PhotoMalaysia’s server already costing us US$1.5k+ (RM5~6k), I paid the money upfront but have received support from other caring PMers from time to time, and sometimes received advertisements from companies and members. If we were to get a 2nd server, it means another US$1.5k+, together with ShaShinKi’s own server (US$1k+), I need to spend US$4k (RM15k) ANNUALLY just for the servers renting. This is A LOT OF MONEY for me…and honestly I do not think I can afford this kind of spending at the moment, especially with my baby daughter coming in June…my wife will be very upset if I were to commit into such a spending.

So, what can be done? Brian is doing his best to tweak the server…but still…the fact is that PhotoMalaysia is still slow from time to time. It makes surfing less fun…and people are attacking us due to that. PhotoMalaysia is like my baby…as much as I love and care about it, I hope it can grow to be the most successful photography website in Malaysia. It is sad that we are slowed down by our hardware limit… :'(

I will think again about the server cost…to commit into such a big expenditure yearly or not…