Mmmm sorry about that. Here's the situation, and how we got here, and why I am unsure what my next step should be.
1. A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away (ok, it was only the next town over, but who's counting?) I registered home-nets.biz with a provider called hostroute. It seemed like a good deal at the time, and the price has dropped a bit and the features increased. We have a mysql database there, it's used to run THIS forum and chat. We have 10MB of disk space, and a mere 2GB of monthly transfer volume (chat uses ALOT when it gets busy).
2. Not so long ago, we were running out of room there, so I sought out a new home for the forum... thus, dhpos.com was born. We migrated the forum over here I believe in March, though I can check the usage data to find out. This host, while more expensive, provides us (as of now) with a roomy 10,000MB of disk space and 500GB of transfer volume. We don't come close to either number, ever.
3. While this host offers mysql hosting (critical for our forum and chat system) they don't allow their databases to be used for chat rooms. This is the ONLY reasons home-nets.biz is still around. I'd much rather drop them and save the money, keeping everything here, on dhpos.com.
Ok... so for the time being, access chat through
http://www.dhpos.com/chat .
It works fine, it's an exact duplicate of the normal chat room, and we pretty much can't run out of bandwidth here.
I'm considering moving to a java based chat. There are 2 things stopping me. First and foremost, java based chats require java to be installed, and I really hate making people install software to use our chat (though something like 85% of users already have java installed). Second, it's alot more complicated. However, using a java based chat hosted here would allow me to move the DB completely over to dhpos.com and cut our dependance on the old site since the java chta doesn't need a database at all. It would also use about 1/10 the bandwidth we currently do for chat.
So, what do you think?
Jonathan Simpson
