We’re back with an extended server!
Phase 2 of the server upgrade is now complete. We have the original server extended with more space that should last us until end of 2024. You can look later in this post for more details on that.
Considerations for the future
This is a situation that we do not want happening in the future.
For context, bandwidth prices tripled during covid. Most hosting companies started to go away from unlimited bandwidth plans, or if they kept them, prices blew up. The same plan in 2021 from our host went up almost five times the price if we were to get it now. We also had to deal with the merging of two companies during this process.
We’ll be having discussions with the backend dev about how to handle distributed servers for this site so we don’t end up deadlocked with no space like what happened in September 2022.
We’re really sorry you went through that. We are set with space for a while, although long term this approach is not something we can continue with.
Extended Server
With the extension on the original server, we have 400 GB of storage. 340 GB of that is usable for the media streamed on the site. That means when we ran out of space, the ~1640 videos on the site took up 139 GB with the 200 GB storage on the old server previously. We needed to keep 1 GB free for system purposes.
The standardization of videos on the site helped us determine an average of 85 MB per HMV. However, this average fluctuates over time. In May 2022, the average was 116 MB per HMV. it’s best to use 100 MB as the baseline to account for said fluctuations.
35 videos were published from March 20th – March 27th in the time that the new server was available. Around 30 videos were also prepared (not published), and we plan on preparing more videos on the new server in preparation of the process for moving back to the legacy server. So as of writing this update, if we want to do forecasts (65 * 100 MB average) = 6.5 GB uploaded as a reference point which means we have (340 – 139 – 6.5) = 194.5 GB, which should allow for roughly 1,950 more videos.
In 2022, 1,111 videos were published on the site. That means (1,111/365 = 3.04) videos per day on average. Rounding down, an average release rate of 3 videos per day over time would be (1,950/3 = 650) more days, which means starting from April we would be good for space until December 2024 another extension is needed. The original October 2024 date we mentioned a few months ago was assuming this would be resolved back in early February.
Future Plans
We’ll be planning out some goals this week now that we’re finally back on the extended legacy server.
For those that have been following the Twitter account, a side dev site is planning to be put up in the future for a better experience in searching for videos. Ideas such as genres, creator information, a random video page, etc. will not be restricted by limitations of WordPress on this dev site. It would end up being a subdomain to hmvmania and we’ll be looking into how to get it up in the future.
We also want to start utilizing the forums more.
There will likely be another blog post talking about future plans in more detail.
Archive: Updates March to April 2023
There were two site updates posted in March on the site itself. It went into maintenance mode and limited access afterwards, until today’s resolution on June 6th, 2023.
When you watch a video and then say you want to go back to the previous page, it seems as though the back button isnt working ,
i have been clicking on the back button but nothing happens iv tried this with other browsers and it appears to be the same on all.
this issue only happen as soon as you have played the video, if you dont play the video when you have click on desired video it works fine when you click on the back button of the browser
but soon as you have clicked play or you are still watching the video, it just doesnt let you go back
is that bug on your site perhaps ?