Outages

[Gavin]

Hi,

The free servers do crash sometimes and when they do it's normally due to a lot of people starting their shoutcast servers up at the same time. If they were set to start back up automatically then the chances are that the server would crash again within minutes, but it is something that I could try as a temporary thing if you like.

[meelismalgand]

That could be very positive thing to try. I really hope it doesn't make the system more unstable. If it is not working out well, It would be great if you can let us know here. Many Thanks.

[thelegacy]

Shoot if I had 250 listeners AT ONCE I'd do cartwheels. I mean I have a paid server with a max of 10-20 listeners at the same time but that is only in the morning Eastern daylight time. I get them till 3PM then it drops off to about 11 around 6:30 PM Eastern Daylight Time. So a max of 250 listeners for FREE users @ 128 I'd still be jumping for joy.

Outages:

You guys are seriously better than some paid services I've had in the past. You may be using VPS servers, but I am curious how many listeners @ 128K you can have before buffering issues come into play.

[Gavin]

The servers we use are a kind of cross between a full dedi and VPS, the hardware is all dedicated apart from the storage which is network based.

It looks like I will have to find another way though as the provider has cut the bandwidth allowance from 100Mbps unmetered to just 10Mbps on a lot of the servers. I'm thinking about just getting a couple of really powerful dedis and setting them up as VPS nodes to use for the free service- that could actually improve the service as it would mean that one of the VPS's on there could borrow extra resources if it became too busy which is better than just crashing. Being in control of the VPS nodes would also give me full control over the number of VPS's on each so would be more stable than using a VPS host (I'd probably put 8 VPS's onto a node whereas a VPS host would probably put 20+ on to the same spec).

[thelegacy]

Gavin your idea sounds really good to me. Actually what you've described could work better than listen2myradio's free service which does buffer a lot plus they won't allow you to embed the Google adsense to your website to allow you to customize your own page using whatever web host you want.

For the time being I've decided not to stream The Legacy till the crashing stops and the stationfinder.org works again as I was pretty much spinning my wheels. When Stationfinder.org was working I'd actually get listeners. I know you'll have it back after you figure things out and its good to know I have this service as a back up when my paid stuff fails. I'll keep an eye on your status page for FREE servers and see where it takes us.

Good work and good thinking Gavin.

[Gavin]

With the stationfinder directory, it basically goes through the databases for each service and checks every server individually. With the free service, there are thousands of servers to check (most of which are offline at any given moment) and it just doesn't seem to like it.

I'll try to come up with a better way of doing it, maybe only check servers that have been started in the last day or something.

[thelegacy]

Yes Gavin that is sort of what I've been thinking. I'll restart my FREE server and see where this all goes. This way I'll get some listeners here like I use to as UK listeners really love Album Rock and I'd be happy to display a great selection.