P.T. Barnum… MOVE OVER!

OK, maybe I was wrong. Maybe Tek doesn’t work for the government, after all. It could very well be that he’s with Halliburton. You know, Halliburton… that company that overcharges the government for, well, pretty much everything.

Or, given the utter lack of skepticism when presented with phony cost data, perhaps there is a high proportion of TNAR members who work for the Pentagon. Sure, that would be a bit more of a stretch than Tek as a professional chiseler, but hey… it squares up nicely with the facts.

Speaking of facts (you know, facts… those inconvenient little bits of information that sometimes get in the way of opinions) let’s look at some. We’ll start here, with the statement that was made to stir up our sympathy:

Tek wrote:
Network costs, domain registrations, and other related costs to run TNA REVIEWS are in the ballpark of $300 per month.

Ok, now let’s go shopping.

aplus.net	$99	IndSoft	$139
ValueWeb	$99	ServerPronto	$99
CalPop	$125	lunarpages	$99
SingleHop	$119	Apollo Hosting	$99

I could go on like this for a long, long time, but I think you get the idea and, besides, I didn’t want to spend more than a couple minutes on this. The point is, these are all dedicated server plans that come with at least 600GB of monthly bandwidth (many come with 1000 or even 2000GB) and somewhere between 50-500 times the amount of disk space than would actually be required to host TNAR.

And I’m having trouble figuring out that “related costs” bit. Does Tek want to charge us for his time now? Whatever it is, it isn’t for software. PunBB is a freebie, and the PHP and MySQL packages needed to run PunBB do not cost extra — in fact it’s getting hard to find a host that doesn’t offer them for free. Oh, and a domain costs exactly the same (around $8-12/year) whether you are hosted on a shared cluster or on a HAL9000.

Sure, I suppose you could pay $300… if you really wanted to. But why? Especially considering that a dedicated server was really not needed at all. Tek didn’t have a disk space problem or a bandwidth problem. He had a database problem — the previous MySQL database wasn’t configured correctly. If the old hosting company couldn’t or wouldn’t tweak things for him, all he really needed was a new host that would give him, say, 50 user connections instead of the 25 that he had before. You can find a hosting plan like that, all day long, for about $25/month.

So, what’s left to ask is… whatya gonna do with all that extra money, dude?

UPDATE: Heh.

I put in a request to increase the number of database connections from 25 to 50. The 5 minute down time was probably them changing the setting and restarting mysql. Let me know if it happens again.

Tek

OK, now lemme get this straight. Tek, you had a known issue: 25 user connections was not enough. So, instead of fixing that, you moved the whole shittin’ thing over to a dedicated server, where the maximum number of user connections is set to… 25?

Dude… are you smokin’ dope?