Ida wrote:Just found out that antcomic.com is taken - apparently by some stand-up dude, so no chance there. Then there's always the .dk option, but in that case, logically I might as well just get a .tk one instead - nobody can tell the difference anyway, and it seems a little stupid to pay money for a difference of one letter that nobody knows what means anyway. On the other hand, I might end up buying the .dk one anyway - I'm stupid like that.
If it were not for the fact that they are way too expensive I would buy an .ly domain just to have ghast.ly as my domain.
About a month or so after I started my comic, before I'd even decided if I was going to stick to it or not some guy e-mailed me and asked me if I'd like to pay him $2000 for ghastly.com.
Kris X wrote:The thing is, and I think I hit on Ghastly's point, is how many Spotters aren't even bothering to come to the Spacer forum and offer help with their found knowledge? Honestly, I haven't heard from a single Spotter, except Sortelli. The way I see it, Keens should keep together and help the community, but since Spot has been on their high horse, they don't realize they have other siblings. Now they want separate from us, isn't that like disowning your sibling? "I like you, well...Not really...So get off my last name!"
Oy, I used to frequent these forums ALL THE DANG TIME. I guess I forgot to rub in people's faces where I was hosted. Damonk, when he had time for the internet, didn't even move his forum to keenspot when he was spotted, because he likes it here. (Of course, I now find it's been locked. Not moved into the spotted folder or whatever. So now he has no forum, poor guy!)
ANYWAY. Just HOSTING. Sometimes it's to your benefit, sometimes you have to work it to make it to your benefit. Or move. What's important is your own dang webcomic and your friends and annonymous people on the internet who want you to draw porn!!
And I <3 you guys, but I didn't read this whole thread, so sorry if what's I've said has been there, done that and you've all moved on to discussing Scrubbo's sexuality. I've been too busy for the internet myself lately. But there is SO MUCH LOVE! Keenspace is very, very special, by any name!
On the name change:
Trivial change on the database backend, slightly less trivial change to change all references to keenspace that weren't done as a ***tag*** of some sort. Maybe I'll just not do anything about the latter immediately. I'm more concerned about accidently destroying everyones templates if grep keenspace | replace (insertnewnamehere)space winds up doing what it did to someone elses site when I tried to do a bulk url rename. I'd encourage people to change the name in their template bythemselves unless they aren't technically proficient to do it.
All I need is the domain registered and it's no less trivial than using kisai.org and having all the comics accesable through it. (Which I was able to do before.)
On Kelly going on strike:
I'm not concerned. While it increases my workload, keenspace itself was never at the top of my list of things to do. In fact it's actually at the bottom, just above eating junk food. (On top is, Work, Sleep, email/IRC/IM, anime) . If you register a domain it will just take longer and you have to make sure you contact ME, not kelly. Or use the Tier II form I made months ago. (Tier II emails me directly if your e-mail address works.) I need to replace this with bugzilla or something, because it's one-way... I get the email but I can't reply. I need to login to space and send the email from the shell so it comes from @keenspace.com ... which is obviously going to change. And no, you can't have my personal e-mail.
I think people overestimate how much "work" is required to run a server. If you have a properly working server, it should run by itself with no administration. However, heaviliy used servers suffer from stress problems, usually disk space or memory related (see March's BAD RAM crash) which unless one person actively monitors the server , the server can be down X hours/days untill that admin checks. So at the bare minimum KeenSPACE and KeenSPOT (and keentoons, keenprime, keenswag, etc) need two people with physical access to the machines, one to watch 12 hours and the other to watch the other 12 hours. Or maybe one insomniac... Anyways, if you remotely administrate a server (like keenspace) then you PAY MONEY for someone to phyiscially access the machine and hit the reset button. So emergency Administration cost is higher without physical access to it. You still need two people to monitor. Now fortunately, several people on keenspace are apt enough to get ahold of me when keenspace has a problem, I only have about 4 hours of availablity during the day, nobody has my cell phone and I'm not giving it to anyone. I can't do anything from work anyways. It would be different if I was working for a non-tech company that just had computers for non-business reasons.
As long as people can get ahold of ONE person to assess a situation, keenspace will be fine. Just don't expect any new features anytime soon. New features require incentive, and there is no incentive to add features to keenspace as all development needs to be done in real time, there are no development servers. If I kill one of the servers by accident, it can take almost a day before someone can reboot it. Fortunately there is very little reason to reboot a linux/freebsd box.
On competion/namecalling/etc:
I don't touch the SPOT vs SPACE wars, All I know is that there is some sour grapes between the two mostly publicized by Ghastly , but I know about it. Keep in mind that everyone has their own spin on a story.
There are competitors to Keenspace, some pay, some free. Keenspace is stable and reliable for long periods of time. Keenspace gives you flexibility. Unless you want to host your site yourself using your own money, you can't get anything better. Bandwidth is expensive (Okay, in CANADA it's a total ripoff, T1, 600$USD ... see the bandwidth market), so unless you are a good business person and technically proficient, not just an artist, you are more likely to incur massive expense to host yourself.
"Unlimited bandwith" is a myth. There are physical limits, and there are system imposed limits. If you are hosted on a place that says "unlimited bandwidth" that means that you are sharing it with everyone else, as soon as one person sharing that bandwidth gets slashdotted, ye all fall down. "Metered Bandwidth" is where you pay by the GB. Most comics don't want this option, as as soon as you get slashdotted, bang you get hit with a large bill. Metered bandwidth is for those who have predictable usage, like telecom/VoIP. Paying for a "Fixed Pipe" means that you will always have X megabits available, so all unused bandwidth is wasted. Take your pick. If you pair your comic with a comic in the UK or Asia, you can make efficient use of bandwidth because the peak periods rotate. Then there is the 95th percentile version which is a hybrid of the fixed pipe and metered, basically it prevents the slashdot megabill by averaging your bandwith at what 95% of your traffic fits in.
Anyways. I don't know IF keenspace makes money, I don't truely care if I get paid for it(money means incentive to develop new stuff,) but I find this thread overly whiney. Name change is trivial. Kelly strikes, keenspace will still be here. Unless the CoLo burns down, the space server will still be going. It would take the fab four, myself and kelly all dying from unnatural causes at the same time for keenspace to drift off into no-maintenance land, and then it will crash and burn when it runs out of disc space. Hmm maybe I should make a failsafe...
Actually, if you're not moving GIGS of data a day, self-hosting is quite reasonable. $600 a month? Not for one coming with 1000 visitors or less a day. It can be less than 1/20th of that.
I'm not concerned. While it increases my workload, keenspace itself was never at the top of my list of things to do. In fact it's actually at the bottom, just above eating junk food. (On top is, Work, Sleep, email/IRC/IM, anime) . If you register a domain it will just take longer and you have to make sure you contact ME, not kelly. Or use the Tier II form I made months ago. (Tier II emails me directly if your e-mail address works.) I need to replace this with bugzilla or something, because it's one-way... I get the email but I can't reply. I need to login to space and send the email from the shell so it comes from @keenspace.com ... which is obviously going to change. And no, you can't have my personal e-mail.
Bugzilla will be intresting to try. When I get back, we can try it out.
Kelly "STrRedWolf" Price
Admin, Comic Genesis
Artist/Writer, Stalag '99 (WolfSkunks and Drygers, oh my!) I NEED MORE TIME, CAPTIN!
Warren wrote:Actually, if you're not moving GIGS of data a day, self-hosting is quite reasonable. $600 a month? Not for one coming with 1000 visitors or less a day. It can be less than 1/20th of that.
I have to agree wholeheartedly here. Self-hosting isn't that bad depending on your situation. For myself, it's only slightly more expensive to self-host than to have cable internet, because I buy a business package. It gives me well more than I'll need for a long time. Even with gaming and such, I don't even eat up half of my bandwidth allotment.
If I wanted to I could probably find a decent host for, maybe, $20 a month as well, which would be even cheaper, and a lot of these hosts have great and reliable service. (I'm a control freak, though, and like having the server physically at my disposal )
I mean really, saying that you need a T1 is like saying that for anything you do you are automatically going to need all of that power, and that's just not the case. And by the time you do need it, if you do something to generate revenue such as host ads then you can probably afford it.
Still, though, it'd be cheaper to go through an actual hosting company, and easier since they'll set up the OS for you.
Free is good, though. Don't get me wrong I'm just saying that self-hosting is, and always will be a viable option. You DO have to take into consideration the possibility of being fark'd, slashdotted, etc, but that's the exception, not the norm. And if it becomes the norm, then you have the power to make some decent cash off of it, unlike if you host it on keenspace (for the most part).
Warren wrote:Actually, if you're not moving GIGS of data a day, self-hosting is quite reasonable. $600 a month? Not for one coming with 1000 visitors or less a day. It can be less than 1/20th of that.
Actually, bandwidth is like corn nuts. Expensive in the little packets but if you go to the bulk barn it's dirt cheap. If you're moving enough gigabytes a day you can get bandwidth in bulk for less than 10 cents a gigabyte if you shop around and know what you're doing. The only thing is you've got to buy your bandwidth in terabyte sized blocks to get it that cheap and most of us here wouldn't use that much. But a bunch of people get together and share the hosting costs and that changes.
This is why there are a number of hosting sites springing up selling "umetered bandwidth" (which is different from "unlimited bandwidth"). In the next five years you're probably going to see the end of metered bandwidth for anything under a terabyte a month. Computer technology is improving and there's increased competition to provide bandwidth all of which are driving the prices down. In the very near future you'll see most hosting sold not by bandwidth but by services offered which is the model Webcomics Nation will be using. Sit automation, development tools, and storage space will be the selling point because bandwidth will be too cheap to meter. There are already a number of hosting companies using this model.
Boy, I picked the right time to end my comic, so I don't have to deal with any of this (the last day is today).
Just to back up some of Ghastly's points, Liz from Real Life posted this on their main site:
There are people out there that hate KeenSpot too. Although, I think it's more of a hatred for Keen Space. It's something about the ability for people to be given a free space to make a webcomic and not have to work for it at all. It's when an artist thinks it'll be a good idea to make a comic, but they don't have the talent for it or the passion that most cartoonists NEED in order for their comic to survive. It's these people that make webcomics look bad. I'm not saying that all KeenSpacers are like that... just a good majority. I think that a lot of the KeenSpacers would agree with me there too.
Gee, and I wonder why Keenspacers feel like they get dumped on all the time.
To say that it's a bad thing that it's easy to put up a comic, to say that a 'good majority' of Keenspace comics are a disgrace to webcomics just epitomizes the arrogance that some of us 'spacers sense in the 'spotters (yes, this specific comment came from the wife of a former spotter, but I think it still holds). There are tons of blogs out there, from professional ones to the one I started a couple months ago and never touched again. Does the awfulness of blogs like mine hurt the top blogs? Does our mere existence give the big dogs a bad name? I doubt it. If any of those blogs even wasted a second bashing the lower echelons of blogdom, people would think it was odd, but here, it's a matter of course.
That's why the name change rubs us the wrong way. Not because a name change would be bad, not because the name change won't have positive benefits (judging from those set forth in this thread, there are far more positives than negatives), it's because the volume of little comments (granted not from everyone, but from enough people) like the above make us feel like a red headed stepchild.
This post wasn't meant to reopen a dead debate. I didn't post last night when I checked because it felt like the thread had moved on and derailed. This morning, it feels like it's back on topic, so I decided to post. Honestly, on the name change, I'm neutral. I can understand why both 'spot and 'space want to leave all the accumulated baggage behind. I can see positives and I can see negatives and it isn't my company, so it's not like my opinion is going to shift mountains anyway. I just wanted to help establish that 'spacers like Ghastly aren't delusionally paranoid.
I am Matt Oliver and I have approved this message.
Rock is dead. Long live paper and scissors!
When I'm not here, I'm doing <a target='blank' href="http://nothingspecial.keenspace.com">Nothing Special</a>.
On the other hand, I might end up buying the .dk one anyway - I'm stupid like that.
Why do they need both??
But there is SO MUCH LOVE! Keenspace is very, very special, by any name!
I'm just saying that self-hosting is, and always will be a viable option. You DO have to take into consideration the possibility of being fark'd, slashdotted, etc, but that's the exception, not the norm. And if it becomes the norm, then you have the power to make some decent cash off of it, unlike if you host it on keenspace (for the most part).
