About going over the transfer limit

[MaX]

Couldn't we close like Backports and all their extra forums, (I read them so it's not that).

Also limiting the size of the attachments to a smaler level should be done now that you can get free 100Mb from google.com

[Klaidas]

Couldn't we close like Backports and all their extra forums, (I read them so it's not that).

Why? That way administrators should keep closing down forums, which would make ubuntuforums.com less friendly and helpful.

[kassetra]

The daily running of the forums isn't the issue; when we have to fend off ddos attacks and the like, that is when we go over our limit and we have issues.

If we never had these issues, we wouldn't go over our limit.

[fimbulvetr]

Shouldn't DDOS attacks involve contacting your service provider and having them black hole the (big) traffic? Minimize the first page, small, really small. Require login to view the forums (except for google, etc)., so the first page is super small. Link/Allow to login. That way, DDOS attacks take something like 50k per request and nothing more.

Perhaps we could also use different themes so the pages aren't so huge. They're pretty big now, for such a small amount of text, we sure could minimize total traffic transferred.

You could even setup cache servers at different providers who offer better deals and simply cache a good deal of requests. Sure, we lose real time when we cache, but what difference does something like 120 seconds make? I'm sure you can find plenty of people who are willing to setup a cache server and you can make it dynamic enough so if they're server goes down noone notices. This also has the advantage that you don't have to worry about anyone have write access to the forum.

[ubuntu-geek]

The back ports are no longer hosted by us they were moved about 7 months ago. The traffic is merely a growth spurt and it needs to be handled now rather then when dapper is released next month.