Busy forums are expensive to host.
Not just this one, but a couple of others I use are struggling to scrape back the money through ads and donations.

Would it be possible to create a forum where users share the hosting.
Peer to peer.

Has this been done with other similar projects?
How does the data get split whilst also allowing users to switch off?

I assume that users would have to open ports, etc which is a pretty large barrier to acceptance. Any way around this?

Sync would be a nightmare. 100 plus machines hosting the same thread and different users posting responses to the same thread on different machines….

So is the difference between a forum and torrents that the data is ever-changing?

Largely, yes. What sort of costs are you seeing? Is it bandwidth or hardware that’s the issue?

you could do round-robin DNS to load balance between a number of peers to take care of the web serving side. Then replication to handle the DB. However it’d be a lot of work plus probably function badly.

pdw – Member

Largely, yes. What sort of costs are you seeing? Is it bandwidth or hardware that’s the issue?
I don’t know. The only forums I’ve developed (well integrated) have been support forums for electronics companies and therefore traffic has been in the hundreds of users a day band.
I would assume both.

I was referring to STW and a couple of other forums I use.

Sometimes they are victims of their own success and cannot afford the hosting once the forums get busy.
Advertising is currently the main business model for all of these. STW at least has the magazine to promote – the others exist only as a forum.

You’re thinking of a P2P hosting infrastructure?

The key with torrents is the data remains constant – as soon as you “edit” a local torrent you are seeding (for example, modifying the ID3 tags on an MP3) – you can’t seed that file (as your copy is different to other peoples).

A constant changing medium, such as a forum, would be nigh on impossible to distribute.

if it’s busy, it needs a robust infrastructure, robust uptime, robust bandwidth,…

there was that Diaspora project, which tried to make some kind of peer-peer hosting of a social network. no idea what happened to it, or how the back end worked, or if it had any potential.

Thanks guys – just thinking out loud really.

If the users invisibly took the load, it would be pretty fair.
But I can see the challenges.

Obviously the easy thing is to just split the cost of hosting among the members, but it’s amazing how off-putting that is to people who have grown up with the ‘free’ web.

Offhand I can think of two concerns.

1) Security. What’s to stop a user amending a local copy of the data? Or injecting (ho ho) malicious adverts? So you need encryption, error checking and all that jazz, which adds complexity. Torrents are static files, they never change; forums are exactly the opposite.

2) Performance. Currently, most people (here at least) have ADSL connections which are relatively slow upstream (that’s what the ‘A’ means). My home connection is something like 15Mbps down, but some order of Kbps up. Serving data to other users, you’re going the “wrong way” across that connection and performance is likely to suffer.

yep – understood.

Torrents are static files, they never change; forums are exactly the opposite.

most forums never change either 🙂

Good point, well made. (-:

How are you hosting? Renting a physical box? Using something like AWS?

Physical boxes tend to be expensive, but you have more control. Something like AWS maybe cheaper, but it’s hard to control your costs.

Diaspora – as someone else mentioned – seems to be the simplest way. However, I thought that relied on a single person hosting their “pod”, or multiple people agreeing to host a pod. You’re essentially running a single instance of a web server, that can “see” the other web server instances. You control what you want to see, but I don’t know how distributed it is. For example, I don’t know if you can host the same web server serving up the same content using multiple machines without any load balancing, or replication.

Happy to be wrong about Diaspora though. Signed up in the early days, but completely forgot about it for ages. Seems like it is ready for mainstream use now though.

How are you hosting? Renting a physical box? Using something like AWS?

This is just theoretical.
I see a web-wide trend.

Ad revenue reducing. Forum use remaining constant.
I see many having funding drives, charging for classified ads, blocking users who avoid ads, etc.

So there is a growing disparity.

One solution is to try and distribute the costs to the users instead of a centralized server. If it was small enough that it wasn’t noticed, nobody would mind.

I’ll look at Diaspora – a quick glance suggests that they still have massive hosting costs.

Another option would be create something like Google Groups, but where every forum could use it’s own look-feel.
Ads would be managed by a much cleverer centralised system, and ad revenue would go the centralized company – forums would be free to site owner and users.

Any other ideas?

One solution is to try and distribute the costs to the users instead of a centralized server. If it was small enough that it wasn’t noticed, nobody would mind.

You’d be surprised the amount of traffic a single physical server can handle (when configured correctly) – so the larger your user base, the lower the ‘per-user’ costs will be.

Look at PinkBike for a staggering performance achievement on a single box ( http://www.pinkbike.com/u/radek/blog/pinkbike-speed.html )