Old news can be found here.
User avatar
By madness
#17220
In a couple of months the hosting account storing Driver Madness will most likely be closed due to the financial crisis. Over the past couple of months I've been watching the US dollar plummet causing hosting costs increasing by almost 40%.

With no ability to fund the website I'm having to relocate Driver Madness, hoping to reduce fees by almost 70%. This movement will cause the website a couple of days downtime and a lot of non-forum related content removed due to new storage and bandwidth restrictions.

Because of this I have to remove inactive websites including
dpl-list, drivermods, gunsinthetrunk and more.

Over time I'll restore, "gunsinthetrunk".
But dpl-list is old, unefficient and soon to be replaced with the DriverWiki.
The drivermods website will be removed after discussion with it's owner.

A major change which will affect Driver Madness is the complete removal of the 20 to 30 gig Download Base at http://www.downloads.drivermadness.net . This has to be removed in order to reduce hosting costs, if it feels necessary I'll make my own backup of everything uploaded ready to restore in the future if I ever decided to spend more on hosting again.

http://www.images.drivermadness.net may also be removed, all images should be available on DriverWiki by that time otherwise I'll restore the images section.

I'm still thinking about the entire issue, in order to save costs I'm thinking of removing the DriverWiki domain and using wiki.drivermadness.net at least until the project becomes fully successful.

With large changes in place I'm thinking about changing the websites name from drivermadness.net to something else, during the next couple of weeks I'm going to discuss this matter with drivermadness members via. MSN (if you want to add me to MSN please PM for my new active address).


After checking Ad-Revenue generated from the site we have earned less than a dollar in the past two months, so this isn't helping and I don't intend to increase the amount of ads displayed on this site.

I plan on contacting my current host to see if there is anything they can do to further limit my data storage and bandwidth usage to reduce hosting fees, in this case I can clean everything up and only remove least downloaded items. Currently our bandwidth usage is 4gig a month compared to 25gig a month when the downloads script was up.

I'll keep you all updated on this situation.
If you want something from the download base start to plan and download it. There are lots driv3r videos from ababbs, demos, trailers, mods and more. You can check out http://www.downloads.drivermadness.net

There is still a while until my account expires.
I'm just planning in advance, to make sure downtime is small.
User avatar
By Nikusakken
#17222
Damn, that's really bad. Specially now, when the next Driver can be announced at anytime soon. Well, I hope that everything's go well.
User avatar
By Fireboyd78
#17223
I know! lets relocate to my website :P
By DeeJay
Registration Days
#17227
(Even though I may appear as a bot on certain parts of this post, I am not a bot. I am just simply trying to help the owner of Driver Madness (madness) out.)

Anyway; I know you may be aware of free hosters, and like many, think/know that most of them suck. That is where I come, instead of you having to pay for another site, here are some unlimited web-hosting sites.

(P.S: I live in the United States and this crisis sucks! :x )

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=fr ... h&aq=f&oq=
Google is your friend :P

http://www.quotaless.org/
Quotaless offers a lot for a free hosting site, and it even has a payment option...

http://www.free-webhosts.com/free-unlim ... bspace.php
(The following is an exert of the page above (Free-Webhosts.com)
These are freehosting servers that claim to offer free hosting with unlimited storage space for hosted files (also called "unlimited web space", "unmetered web space", or "unmetered webspace"). While there is obviously no such thing as "unlimited webspace" in the fullest since, what they mean is the there are no set limits imposed by the free web hosting company to the amount of hard disk space you can use other than the available harddrive space on the freewebhosting server.

I figure that is enough for you to browse through right now. If you would like more, simply ask, and I would be happy to look for more.

-David
User avatar
By Coyote
#17268
Free webhosts suck. I prefer to pay and have something solid.
User avatar
By madness
#17273
Driver Madness started out on Free Hosting for it's first year, it was reliable. Then the free hosting company was sold, the new owner was getting sick and I think he died :x :( :cry: .

The old Driver Madness url used to work up until a couple of months ago and my hosting was still up and running. There no one to administrate it and they reset my password and never told me my new one so I was unable to change anything.

So then I went to paid hosting, I still had a couple of problems but live support was helpful. Now my paid host doesn't support live chat for anything except sales enquires. With the 40% price increase things are difficult, I'm going to do what ever I can to give Driver Madness a good future.

I'm trying to find a cheap host which supports cpanel.
1gig Storage
5gig Transfer
5 MySQL Databases
10 Sub-Domains
5 Add-on Domains

There is another place were I can get hosted, they don't offer cpanel but that's no big problem.
User avatar
By Coyote
#17274
I was going to switch to Bluehost, what's wrong with it ? Prices are still the same.
User avatar
By madness
#17277
There is nothing wrong with Bluehost.
When you convert AU dollars to US dollars there is a 40% price increase.
If you have the money, I would recommend them. It might not be as bad when converting your currency.

Sometime last year the security on the server driver madness was on had a security hole and all websites lost there index.xxx, home.xxx pages after someone hacked the server. There were hundreds of pages I had to recover which was very time consuming.

I'm planning ahead though, it's approximately another 100 days until my account expires.
User avatar
By Coyote
#17278
Oh okay so I think I'm still gonna switch to bluehost.

Yeah I think I remember that, when everything was lost.

BTW you didn't answer my PM !
User avatar
By Fireboyd78
#17460
You MUST go to 110mb.com!

Just make it so drivermadness.net is pointed to their servers. It is NOT hard! They also have paid upgrades, which is ONE TIME ONLY FEE. You could probably spend like $100 I think and then only cover the .NET fee's. Check it out! Driver Database is run on 110mb and its ****ing reliable as hell, plus you get LIVE SUPPORT on the forum 24/7!

Don't let Drivermadness go down the drain, and trust me - their much better now.
User avatar
By Harlequin
Registration Days Posts Posts Posts Posts Avatar
#17462
Silly panicky Americans... They caused black Thursday too, doing the exact same thing.

Fair sure we're all willing to follow though Madness, no matter where we go....XD


But I have a lot of downtime until Uni starts, and probably a lot even when it starts :shock: so I'll try and find anything I can... My amazing search engine usage will finally come in handy for things other than winning sh!t competitions... :D
User avatar
By madness
#17508
Unfortunately the economic crisis and the fact I'm finding no time to work on these forums and more recently posting on them is annoying.

Now I've started full time 'Tertiary study' I'm even busier.
By next holidays I will have planned my actions.
and during those holidays I'll transfer the forums to another server.
Then I'll simplify the forums by converting them to PHPBB3 (losing very little data, adding many more STABLE features) which will prevent script incompatibilities so I don't have to work on the forums as much.

This community has grown so much and I would never let it disappear :wink: .

When I get a job and can fund a few more projects I'll get my own reseller hosting package and Driver Madness can live there :).
User avatar
By Coyote
#17527
madness wrote: This community has grown so much and I would never let it disappear :wink: .
How could you ever do that mate ;)

But 110 MB is definitely not enough !
By cleone
#18463
madness wrote:In a couple of months the hosting account storing Driver Madness will most likely be closed due to the financial crisis. Over the past couple of months I've been watching the US dollar plummet causing hosting costs increasing by almost 40%.

With no ability to fund the website I'm having to relocate Driver Madness, hoping to reduce fees by almost 70%. This movement will cause the website a couple of days downtime and a lot of non-forum related content removed due to new storage and bandwidth restrictions.

Because of this I have to remove inactive websites including
dpl-list, drivermods, gunsinthetrunk and more.

Over time I'll restore, "gunsinthetrunk".
But dpl-list is old, unefficient and soon to be replaced with the DriverWiki.
The drivermods website will be removed after discussion with it's owner.

A major change which will affect Driver Madness is the complete removal of the 20 to 30 gig Download Base at http://www.downloads.drivermadness.net . This has to be removed in order to reduce hosting costs, if it feels necessary I'll make my own backup of everything uploaded ready to restore in the future if I ever decided to spend more on hosting again.

http://www.images.drivermadness.net may also be removed, all images should be available on DriverWiki by that time otherwise I'll restore the images section.

I'm still thinking about the entire issue, in order to save costs I'm thinking of removing the DriverWiki domain and using wiki.drivermadness.net at least until the project becomes fully successful.

With large changes in place I'm thinking about changing the websites name from drivermadness.net to something else, during the next couple of weeks I'm going to discuss this matter with drivermadness members via. MSN (if you want to add me to MSN please PM for my new active address).


After checking Ad-Revenue generated from the site we have earned less than a dollar in the past two months, so this isn't helping and I don't intend to increase the amount of ads displayed on this site.

I plan on contacting my current host to see if there is anything they can do to further limit my data storage and bandwidth usage to reduce hosting fees, in this case I can clean everything up and only remove least downloaded items. Currently our bandwidth usage is 4gig a month compared to 25gig a month when the downloads script was up.

I'll keep you all updated on this situation.
If you want something from the download base start to plan and download it. There are lots driv3r videos from ababbs, demos, trailers, mods and more. You can check out http://www.downloads.drivermadness.net

There is still a while until my account expires.
I'm just planning in advance, to make sure downtime is small.
Be careful. You can't switch to a European host because the crisis is spreading across to Europe now. It was in the news today. Soon, it may even be all over the world. :( Here comes the next "Great Depression".
User avatar
By Driver of DOOM
Registration Days Posts Posts Posts Posts Avatar
#18567
I think its all hype, a way for the traders to gain mega bucks, curse them!!! :x
Crazy Copper Frenzy

https://youtu.be/xAE3QsULyB4

https://youtu.be/AxdGf3F0yIg

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