Why folo can’t go “home” just yet

Okay, everybody, folo’s webmaster “riddenword” says we better stay right here at old folo through tomorrow, on the outside chance that Zach Scruggs enters a plea and early word of it gets us all hitting our Refresh buttons at the same rate we did Friday morning.

That, not massive new traffic (say 222,000 Scruggsianans all at once, hee), is what smoked the servers, he figures. Problem was, those poor dumb machines couldn’t tell us news-hungry upstanding ‘Murkans from Rooskie or Côte d’Ivoirian bogies launching a “distributed denial of service” attack. Possibly a mere couple thousand of us suddenly, furiously pecking away at our Skinner levers sufficed, within minutes, to reduce riddenword’s Dallas server-farm guy to a congealed salad of terror.

If we do that to him again the second business-day running . . . well, you can imagine. As riddenword explained to me, this chap “bears the cost of replacing the parts that will fail earlier because of the massive load we generated Friday, as well as the public relations cost of having dozens of servers fall into slow-mo as folo’s audience assaulted his bandwidth, not to mention the disruption of having his techs racing through the racks of servers furiously typing code and throwing switches to re-balance the bandwidth load. Picture a computer in a crowded office suddenly bursting into flames, and you’ll have an idea of what kind of panic ensued.”

Now according to riddenword, this guy’s accustomed to dealing with massive traffic — as long as the infrastructure is adequate (one of his clients runs 13 servers in parallel, each with 32 Gigabytes of installed RAM, reaching a mega-audience. Bet you can guess what he peddles. Well, be dang if we didn’t reach out and touch even him in the Philippines the other day!).

But what our dear riddenword runs is Dogstuff, the store in Austin whose own (pretty huge) server hosts folo.us directly. And he reports, “Looking toward the future, it’s apparent that folo has become the tail that - on occasion at least - is starting to wag the dogstuff. During the period that folo was deactivated, the dogstuff.com site (aka, my bread and butter) became vastly more responsive, developed a spring in its step, and started bounding like a young pup.”

So we gotta do something about this, and pretty pronto. But I don’t know of a way to do it for free. The server-farm guy says he needs a little over $600 a month to supply us equipment equal to folo’s needs (riddenword has checked around and thinks that’s a pretty good deal: “For comparison purposes, I understand that a site like Daily Kos has bandwidth charges in the range of $10,000 a month. For that investment, I think what he means is that the server might slow down and get balky at maximum load, but he won’t need to shut a site down as he did Friday.”)

You guys. I can’t afford $60 a month, let alone $600, to keep treating you to folo. Between my posting and emailing back-and-forth with sources, I’m trying to learn a little something about marketing (a whole new world for me) and how to make better use of folo’s ad-space — those pretty-dumb robots of Google’s can’t seem to figure out what interests y’all much, nor are NMC and I apparently too hot at guessing your interest in Amazon offerings. Though riddenword’s got a lead on someone who can help me do better internet marketing, basically, here’s the sitch:

folo is a garage startup now facing the decision of whether to rent office space or just potter out. Under twenty of y’all have hit the tip-jar since that went up last month (all as generous as possible, some quite beneficent, one shockingly so, and each deeply appreciated). While I think top-quality advertisers will be most interested in an audience like you, I can’t just snap my fingers and make them appear. So I don’t see how folo gets there from here without a LOT more sustenance from its readers than it’s had so far.

I assume some foloers are well-heeled but know many aren’t, so I can’t stand to make this a subscription-only site (shoot, I couldn’t afford to subscribe myself). But if we want to continue our community and keep its focus on what’s to come in Scruggsiana — in Mississippi and wherever else (cough *D.C.* cough) its tendrils run — well, do you expect to get your utilities and groceries and lawyering for free?

My dear, the stark fact is: if we’re to go on, folo badly needs your — and I do mean your — help.

lotus

Update:

Just to make one point clear - Lotus really isn’t asking for $600 a month, because the largest part of the server cost - about $350 a month - is and will remain dogstuff’s responsibility.    We’ve been carrying folo along with our own traffic  but y’all have finally reached the point where your growth is degrading our server’s performance.

Upgrading the server and allowing folo to continue to ride on our shoulders (but with adequate capacity) seems to be a cheaper alternative than setting up a stand-alone server wth enough capacity for  folo, (and it avoids a substantial setup fee) but Lotus misunderstood - dogstuff would continue to pay the bulk of the server cost in order to maintain our business websites as well as continuing to cover the costs of periodic technical support by our contracted technician.  You don’t need to carry any of our costs and we’ve been happy to host you - whether you meant to or not, y’all have created an amazing example of citizen journalism that is a model for what the Internet should be doing.

—riddenword