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WetWii.com has evolved into a music and photo file sharing portal for the Nintendo Wii. Simply upload a JPEG or MP3 from you desktop PC and you can than view or listen to the file using the Internet Channel on your Nintendo Wii. Simple and effective.

Over the christmas period I have been developing a new website featuring classic 80s and 90s cartoon intros. I developed the website to brush up on my SQL database skills and also to share the collection of cartoon intros that circulated Kent University's student network a while back. I hope to add a simple comments section to each cartoon page in the near future. Take a look.

www.cartoonintros.com

I recently signed up for free broadband with Talk Talk. After complaining multiple times, being lied to, waiting for months and reading about other peoples problems online I asked them to cancel the 18 month contract. Turns out that it costs £70 to cancel! It's two months on now and broadband has not even been connected. I've calculated that Talk Talk's FREE broadband is going to total £382 in hidden costs for the 18 months duration of the contract. I'm pretty disgusted they can label this as free, and I know I'm not the only one pissed off with Talk Talk so I've set up a forum for others to share their experiences.

Please add your experience regarding Talk Talk Broadband here:

I like having a good moan, particularly when I'm justfied in doing so.

I've had quite a lot of feed back regarding the page I put up about my frustration with 123-reg.co.uk. I had several people suggest making it into a forum for other people to share their experience too. So I did:

I have been using Google Analytics to gather some interesting statistics about visitors to the Host Yourself Network. One of my main interests is how many people come back to the site after visiting. The graph below shows exactly that. It seems an awful lot of people (I've labled them random surfers) visit once and never come back. This is to be expected on any website. I then have a fair number of what I call infrequent users who have used MyDiskServer and the Host Yourself Network a few times. Most importantly though, I have a large number of users who have visited the site between 10 and 200 times - my regular users. It is my aim to increase this group.

Finally google have calculated an initial pagerank for MyDisk.co.uk and HostYourself.net.

Initial pagerank for MyDisk.co.uk and HostYourself.net:

PR 4

This is an excellent starting pagerank, especially for HostYourself.net since it only went live on 18th of May 2006 - that's less than 2 months ago!

The following images will update as pagerank increases or decreases:

MyDisk.co.uk: HostYourself.net:

Thank you everyone who have provided links to the Host Yourself Network.

Regular readers will know about all the problems I had with the web hosting company 123-reg where MyDisk.co.uk was origonally hosted. Well finally, after several more months, I have had a response. The previous email I sent to 123-reg asked for a refund. I am not even using their services anymore afterall! Here is their response...

There is no SLA for hosting.

"4.3 PIPEX warrants that it will provide the Services with reasonable care and skill and in accordance with any SLA."

An, or 'any' SLA is not agreed to by us or the end user when ordering hosting. We will make every effort to resolve issues however there is no guranteed % uptime, i.e. an SLA.

Regards, Christian, 123-reg Support, PIPEX

I have sent one more email. I don't really know why, they have wasted far too much of my time already. However the email goes like this...
[Read More]

With a lot of hard work, MyDisk is starting to be listed top in google and msn for search terms such as "share disk online".

It would be nice to get better ranking for searches like "share files online" but there is so much competition that it could take years! I'm still waiting for google to calculate page ranks for mydisk.co.uk and hostyourself.net I'm hoping for at least a 4 because I've spent a lot of time getting inbound links.

If anyone tells you its easy to get listed highly in google, they obviously only tried for specific searches such as company names etc. SEO is certainly more challenging for commonly searched terms and the only way I've found of getting good results is by carefully placing and repeating words on the page. I don't like the wording on MyDisk.co.uk but this is the result of carefully targeted keywords.

Having said all this, I still feel that there are too many SEO companies on the web. I get SO much spam from them. They all claim to "submit your website to tens of thousands of search engines" etc. How many search engines do you use? Exactly, pointless.

I've seen an increasing number of web sites of the "get more hits" variety too. These claim to instantly give you thousands of "hits" or "unique visits". I looked into these and found this is exactly what they do. Good eh? NO! They use a large pool of IP addresses and automatically request your web page. No one views your page, they are just requested to increase your hit counter. What a total waste of Internet bandwidth!?

Anyway, rant over. If you want to help me, link to MyDisk.co.uk.

MyDiskServer version 2 has now been in operation for one month.

During this month the Host Yourself Network has recorded:

2,300 unique visitors
1,700 downloads of MyDiskServer.
190 unique registrations.
7 donations (thank you)

Each instance of MyDiskServer reports the total number of accesses and total number of bytes transferred for analysis.

This enables me to get a better understanding of how MyDiskServer is used. In the last month the total number of connections all installations MyDiskServer served was 106 thousand. The total number of bytes transferred was 36.2 GB. (An average of nearly 200MB per instance of MyDiskServer)

Here is a breakdown of the quantity of data the 190 instances of MyDiskServer served.



I would consider someone who has had at least 50 accesses and transferred at least 1MB to be a "user" of the Host Yourself Network.

So, in conclusion:

2,300 visitors -> 1,700 downloads -> 190 registrations -> 82 users

Great news, the host yourself network is now running nicely!

I have a steady stream of new users and a healthy number or returning users. Several users have now kindly donated too. All good news!

I've also noticed a large percentage of the total hosts (users who got MyDiskServer working and registered) keep mydiskserver running. Typically between 5% and 15%. This is much better than MyDiskServer 1 which had over 1000 registered users but less than 10 active (1%).

Thanks everyone, don't forget the forum is a useful tool for communicating with other users.

The Host Yourself Network has now been in operation for 1 month.

MyDisk.co.uk has been completely updated to be part of the Host Yourself Network and a steady stream of new and old users are moving to the new service.

The stats for May are as follows, hopefully the trend will continue.

I've been calculating how many users the Host Yourself Network could potentially support.

First access:
An average of 500KB web site data + 250KB for MyDiskServer download.
Per day communications:
200Bytes per 5 minutes for server communications ~= 10KB (5 hours use)
100KB web site data for 2 remote accesses
Total:
750KB + 110KB * 31days ~= 4MB per user, per month

Lunarpages provide 400GB Transfer limit, therefore the maximum number of users is:
= 400,000 / 4
= 100,000 users!

I knew the most difficult part of the configuration of MyDiskServer was opening ports but I was unaware, until now, of exactly how much of a problem this was for users.

The pie chart displays the last known incoming connection state of users who ran MyDiskServer version 1 from MyDisk.co.uk. As you can see, the majority of users failed to unblock their inbound connection (38%) Only 35% of the users got MyDiskServer working fully! Its somewhat worrying that 26% did not even get as far as testing their connection. I assume this is because they failed to understand how to use the software, which is not surprising since the majority of the visitors to MyDisk.co.uk were Spanish!

The new version automatically tests the connection and encourages users to configure their network BEFORE registration. Therefore it can be assumed that MyDiskServer version 2 will have a lower rate of registration but consequently fewer zombie users.

Today, the 18th of May 2006, I officially opened HostYourself.net. This web site will take over from where MyDisk.co.uk left off.

The software is complete. Version 2 of MyDiskServer finally gets my approval and is ready for launch.

For those of you interested; MyDiskServer 2 consists of 66 Java classes and, together with server side scripts, over 10 thousand lines of code!

Due to the problems I had with my previous hosting company, 123-reg, I decided to move elsewhere.

This web site is hosted with lunarpages.com, who actually seem to know what customer service, support and hosting features are all about! They are not too expensive and offer 400GB bandwidth a month! They even provided a free domain name so I spent a great deal of time considering new names for MyDisk.

Many people had said that the title MyDisk does not really explain what it's all about. I decided I needed a name that explained it better. Essentially, MyDiskServer is a personal web server which enables the user to host files from their computer. - To Host yourself on the Internet.

I knew I wanted a .net suffix as networking is what it's all about! MyDiskServer with the Host Yourself web site is creating a network of personal computers hosting files.

HostYourself.net - The name was born!

MyDiskServer and MyDisk.co.uk seems to be taking off!
However, I'm having severe problems with hosting...

Firstly, my web host, 123-reg, only provide 1.5GB of bandwidth each month and, with current growth, it looks like it may only live until mid May.

I am generally very disappointed by 123-reg. The server MyDisk.co.uk is hosted on is offline every 15 minutes for up to 2 minutes. They have not responded in nearly a month about this. It works out at less than 90% uptime! Their system clock is also incorrect (10 minutes slow). I wish they would at least acknowledge something was wrong, but instead they ignore me!

In conclusion, I'm looking for a new web host to move to.

Here are the statistics for April. MyDisk.co.uk's official first month!