Final Fantasy

[Burning Zeppelin]

Nah, I meant with the site.
So basically this is your site Ramsus?

[Ramsus]

Only the domain and the code. Zeality has always run the site (We're high school buddies). I just put together what he needed to manage it all and stuck it on a server. I'm actually shocked at the direction it's taken in the last year.

Did you know that for one year we even ran the site off of a cable connection and an old desktop PC in my bedroom? We were between hosts, and I was experimenting with alternatives to what we were using at the time (phpBB and a lot of custom stuff I wrote).

Honestly, we've had more downtime problems than just about any other gaming site in the last three years, and it's never fazed us one bit.

[Burning Zeppelin]

Only the domain and the code. Zeality has always run the site (We're high school buddies). I just put together what he needed to manage it all and stuck it on a server. I'm actually shocked at the direction it's taken in the last year.

Did you know that for one year we even ran the site off of a cable connection and an old desktop PC in my bedroom? We were between hosts, and I was experimenting with alternatives to what we were using at the time (phpBB and a lot of custom stuff I wrote).

Honestly, we've had more downtime problems than just about any other gaming site in the last three years, and it's never fazed us one bit.

How romantic! Sorry...
Thats pretty cool. Reminds me of the old time bedroom game developers. Like Darwinia. And developers like Google, and Linux. It just goes to show that anyone can make a brillian site.
I can just imagine zeality now:

Sorry Zeality, it just had to be done.

[saridon]

rofl its a cyclops both its eys are joined

oh and for anyone still interested the address changed too http://forums.cjb.net/yourffrealms.html but is 80% offtopic still

and Ramsus you must have had almost no internet connection yourself if you ran the site off a comp in your room

[Ramsus]

I designed a special low-bandwidth layout to make it easier to cope (although the current layout is pretty light too...), but really it only worked because we hadn't yet started expanding into multimedia content. The biggest factor allowing us to get by was the number of visitors we got on a daily basis, which was an order of a magnitude lower than it is now.

I'd use the incredible bandwidth here on campus, except the IT guys firewall everything and don't want people hosting outside domains on their network.

What finally pushed us onto paid hosting though was BitTorrent.

[Burning Zeppelin]

Grrr, not those IT guys! Well, as a jock, Ramsus must of been out there putting them into their place, Homer Simpson style.

A low bandwith site everyone must agree is better. A flash site may look "cool" but in terms of accessibility, simplicity, and fast loading, nothing beats a simple site.
http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=faq
Then press Ctrl+F, then type in "Why does your site look so shitty? / Why do you use such huge fonts?" then look at the words of wisdom.

[Mystik3eb]

I prefer non-flash sites. For every reason.

[Resurrected Ice]

Man, I'm getting back memories from being a FF site owner/webmaster....Yes, I used to run one back in the day and I will agree that it's not all fun and games.  Although I can't ever recall reaching as far as Ramsus with alternatives to hosting, I definitely had my difficulties in running it.    Needless to say, I had quite a falling out with the people who used to work with me and that's why I decided to stop running that site.  Now honestly, I don't think I would ever want to do that kind of thing again and it's also the reason I have avoided gaming communities for the longest time up until now.  I've checked back from time to time, and my successors decided to evolve the site into a general gaming site and turned it to crap....

Talk about a waste of work for everyone who made gaming sections there because the staff trashed all of them.  But I guess at the same time, it's not my problem anymore....

[Ramsus]

We always went by the guiding principle of "Content first, form second," so no matter what we did with the site, the content remained. It was a real pain at times, but it was definitely worth it. If push came to shove, we were ready to create a static version of the site that could be hosted anywhere.

However, managing things has gotten a lot easier and cheaper over the last three years. Just the other day, I found a web hosting provider that sets up virtual machines with User-mode Linux instead of using virtual hosting with Apache.

They even limit your CPU and RAM usage based on the plan you have (using a resource scheduling hack), so nobody else on the same physical machine can affect your site. And UML is completely sandboxed, so if another virtual machine on the same physical machine gets smoked, it doesn't affect you one bit.

So for $10/month, you get full access and can do whatever you want. Very tempting for an avid Lisp programmer on a tight budget like myself.

Hell, part of the reason I don't do much with the site except make backups and design new layouts is that I hate PHP (and Perl for that matter). While not as boring as programming in say, Java or C++, PHP makes up for it by being a pretty damn ugly language.

If I could get a job writing code in Lisp and C, I'd take it in a heartbeat.