When will Keenspace be back up? It's been almost a week!

Amirai · Post by **Amirai** » Mon Jun 03, 2002 9:52 pm

Am I the only one who hasn't been able to load any keenspace site for most of a week now?? I would have expected to see some posts about it, but it sounds like other people are having no problem veiwing their sites... even if they're having other problems.

Does anyone know what's going on, and when the problem will be fixed?

ZOMBIE USER 10053 · Post by **ZOMBIE USER 10053** » Mon Jun 03, 2002 10:22 pm

Yep I've been having the same problem myself, I can't figure out what the heck's been going on. Sometimes I can load some sites but then it cuts out again and I get the Error Pages. If we keep replying and viewing this post it'll look important and then more people will respond and hopefully it will get fixed, no?

Post by **Kisai** » Mon Jun 03, 2002 10:30 pm

As of about June 1st, keenspace's hard drive started acting funny and wrecked some things.

It's down again, it might come back up sometime tomorrow at this rate.

Nothing I can do about it, as nate's probably gone to bed and turned off his pager.

Marverick · Post by **Marverick** » Tue Jun 04, 2002 7:36 pm

The servers have been flickering in and out of existance since the begining of the week...my readerbase is getting decimated

hope you fix this soon. ^^

Ghastly · Post by **Ghastly** » Sat Jun 08, 2002 10:12 pm

Week!? Week!? Things have been shakey at best ever since Keenspace was kicked off the Keenspot server back in January and put on this ghetto server which seems to be built out of scavanged spare parts based on how many of the failures have been reported to be hardware related.

The lessons are:
1) Always keep the receipt so when someone sells you hardware that turns out to be total crap you can take it back to them and return it to the appropriate orifice.
2) Become a Keenspot comic so people will actually give a crap about you.

Post by **Kisai** » Sat Jun 08, 2002 10:22 pm

Well it was up for almost one day solid X_x, then it just died for no reason. When it came back up, the files I had been working on became mush. (Good thing they are files that can be rewritten from scratch.)

Since the drive appears to be failing, they(keenspot entertainment) is supposed to be leasing a new machine soon. I wonder how long that will take.

Certain things are on the backburner till it gets here (like newsbox II, guide II, new advertisement systems, etc)

Ghastly · Post by **Ghastly** » Mon Jun 10, 2002 10:13 am

I'm not quite sure myself what exactly the idea behind Keenspace is. Is Keenspace being run as a hobby, or is it being run as a business? If it's being run as a business I can't see how it could possibly be a profitable one if it relies on advertising revinue from banner ads since you can't make any money off ads that arn't displayed because people can't access they pages they're being served on.

Part of the problem is likely simply due to the fact that they're running a server with over 5000 comics on it. Granted most of them do not generate a significant number of hits but the sheer volume of them must be gumming up the works enough to prevent Keen from exploiting their top Space comics.

Let's assume that 98% of the comics on Keenspace are, to put it bluntly, crap that don't generate any significant traffic. If that were true that would still leave over 100 comics of quality that do generate significant traffic. I happen to know for a fact that there are a number of Keenspace comics that have as many, if not more readers than some comics on Keenspot.

Let's take a recent Keen aquisition, Sexy Losers. An immensly popular comic. Before it moved to Keen it was bringing in sometimes as many as 18K unique visits per day. Not bad for a comic that publishes only once a week, not bad at all. There are some Keenspot comics that publish daily not bringing in those numbers. Now this comic is on Keenspace and it's pulling in about 6K to 10K a day simply because the server is down so often many readers can't get through. This is still on par with some Keenspot comics.

Because Sexy Losers is stuck on this crap server with all these thousands of other comics that don't really produce anything for Keen, Keen is losing potential revinue they could be making off Sexy Losers.

Now it's cool, and everything, that Keen offers webspace to comics reguardless of wether they produce or not. I think that's really great and you never know when you might get a comic that, over time, will become very popular. I started out with only about 300 readers a week and a year later I've managed to grow to between 6K and 7K (when Keenspace is working that is). The thing is, however, that if Keen's goal is to make a profit, they're handicapping themselves by lumping comics that produce on the same piece of crap server as comics that don't produce.

If they want to make a profit from the advertising then they've got to get these comics that draw in large number of readers off this crappy server and onto one that consistantly works. Otherwise they're missing the potential to exploit these comics for revinue.

The can still keep Keenspace running the way it is. Giving webspace to any comic that asks. It's a great place for comics that prove themselves. But once a comic has managed to prove itself, say when it reaches the point where it is consistantly bringing in over 1000 or 2000 or 3000 readers a week, then it should be moved to a decent server so that the revinue potential isn't comprimised by the thousands of comics that don't produce.

Now if Keenspace is being run merely as a hobby then by all means just continue the way it is, but I can't see how you can expect to run an internet business on a server that is never up.

Post by **Kisai** » Mon Jun 10, 2002 10:51 am

IMO, keenspace should either migrate the popular comics to keenspot faster, or should simply move them to the keenspot server, even if they still say .keenspace.com and never show up on the keenspot page.

However, if you want to know why keenspace isn't making money, keenspace made less than 20$ for 2 million page views in one day. This is because less than 0.4%(about 80K) were paying advertisements. This doesn't cover the cost of the bandwidth used per day. If anything it saves keenSPOT money when the space server goes down.

Add into the fact that HE.net, keenspace's upstream provider wants to raise the price on bandwidth.

KeenSPOT makes money, as more of the advertisements are actually paid advertisements... usually.

The idea now is to sell more merchandise (http://www.keenswag.com), subscriptions (KeenSPOT premium), paid hosting (KeenPrime) to make money.

Ghastly · Post by **Ghastly** » Mon Jun 10, 2002 11:39 am

All of which will be better accomplished by getting the top performing Keenspace comics onto a reliable server.

Post by **Kisai** » Mon Jun 10, 2002 11:43 am

New server is on it's way

Ghastly · Post by **Ghastly** » Mon Jun 17, 2002 3:23 pm

Incidently, if you want ads that pay you've got to go with porn ads. Now granted there are many keenspace comics for which porn ad banners would be highly inappropriate but there are a number of comics such as Sexy Losers, and T.A. Vision, and my comic where porn ads would not be out of place at all. Maybe Keenspace should look into creating a special grouping of adult themed comics where the artist agrees to allow them to run porn banners on the comics. I certainly wouldn't object to it. Hell, Sexy Losers used to be hosted on Stiles Project with some of the most disturbing porn banner ads known to mankind.

It's just a fact of life that porn is a great way to make money on the internet and running porn banners pays. Something to seriously think about.

Also, if I had a webpage that generated 2 million pageviews per day and all I managed to take in at the end of the day was twenty freakin' dollars I would be seriously looking at re-evaluating my business model. Why is it that so few of the ads are paying ads? 2 million collective pageviews is nothing to be sneezed at. Is Keen not running enough paying ads for the simple reason that they can't keep the server functional long enough to make the advertisers happy? Or is Keenspace just more valuable as a forum to advertise for Keenspot?

Post by **Kisai** » Mon Jun 17, 2002 4:12 pm

Well, nate did change part of the advertising back end (does two cookies now aparently.)

Unfortunately, the database backend of it seems to die (taking support.keenprime.com down with it) every few hours, which is why ad's tend to be those broken-images instead of the generic keenspot banner.

From the advertising side of things, there are only two real viable options:
A: Change advertising providers, get more sources, add more ads per page, piss off more readers (like yahoo/geocities) and other nasty things that devalues the sites.
B: Own advertisement back-end where people can support their favorite comic and keenspace by buying advertising space so they can plug whatever(other sites, resumes, naked pictures, etc.)

However the admins are putting more weight on the keenswag system and hoping people will buy stuff from there.

Also only the print comics are making any money, so go buy all the print keenspace comics.

I'd endorse a system where all the comics can be separated into their respective ratings (ALL, PG, R, NC17+) and advertisers can bulk advertise on all the similarly related sites. Likewise there needs to be a way to bulk advertise on all the anime, furry, school, gamer, techie type comics.

Ghastly · Post by **Ghastly** » Tue Jun 18, 2002 6:20 am

They could run at least one more banner ad on the bottom of the comic and I doubt it would piss off any readers as long as they stay away from pop-ups and those annoying Yahoo/Geocities side windows.

I agree too that they need to intelligently target their advertising and better organize comics by content.

There's no way with 2 million page views a day you should only be making $20 a day in advertising. That's only $600 a month. There are websites with only 2 million page views a month making more than that from advertising.

As for print comics. I didn't think there were any Keenspace comics in print form. I thought it was only the spotters that made it to print.

Incidently, I would think that if Keenspace doesn't promote a comic like Sexy Losers (which has already become the top draw on Keenspace) to Keenspot they're missing a golden opportunity. They already lost one of their top 10 comics (Kung Fool) to because of unreliability. It would probably be a good idea to spot Boy Meets Boy because that comic has such a huge audience too.

Post by **Kisai** » Tue Jun 18, 2002 12:08 pm

My bad, that should have said KeenSPOT print comics.

Gah... what happened to KungFool?

The account still exists on keenspace...

Ghastly · Post by **Ghastly** » Tue Jun 18, 2002 5:23 pm

I believe Hyung just became tired of never being able to access his comic and the updates never working right and getting e-mail from readers asking "Where is the comic? Why is it always down?" so he moved the comic to another server.

He left the old one up on Keenspace still with a note and a link to the new site.

Pity that Keen let that one slip through their fingers. It really should have been Spotted. Hyung is a professional print comic artist as well.

Post by **Kisai** » Tue Jun 18, 2002 6:24 pm

*sigh*

Can't be helped I guess.

Hopefully keenprime goes up and works, but the people resonsible for admin'ing all the keen servers are overloaded and are very hard to get ahold of short of phoning them.

At this point in time right now, the Keen servers bandwidth has been capped (to like half of normal) so even if KeenPrime were to go up this month, it would be impaired by the rest of the servers bandwidth usage (which peaks between noon and 3PM Pacific.)

I'm be giving nate feedback about areas where bandwidth can be saved and they've been all but ignored completely. The biggest bandwidth waste being operating the forums... I've taken a hacksaw to phpBB's templates so they produce 90% smaller html files... so IF the advertising was still working properly. Then there is the gzip compression that has been given the brush-off because it might use CPU usage (think about it, which uses more CPU, compressing a 175KB html file into 5KB and sending it in under one second, or not compressing it and sending it in 35 seconds to modem users)

The Individual KeenSPACE accounts have little room for efficiency short of doing anything that affects image quality, most of the problems stemming from people simply putting too much stuff on their front page (*cough* Does everyone need to join every single drop-down?) There are opportunities to save bandwidth by referrer checking image requests and telling bots/spyders/image harversters/direct-linkers to go take a long walk off a short pier.

Then there is the GoogleBot which has been responsible for a few overloads.

I think server stability has been restored for the forums, but there is still is an outstanding hardware issue on the KeenSPACE server (nope, no new server yet.)

Ghastly · Post by **Ghastly** » Wed Jun 19, 2002 7:00 am

Kisai wrote:*sigh*
Can't be helped I guess.

I don't know if I'd agree with that.

Kisai wrote: Hopefully keenprime goes up and works, but the people resonsible for admin'ing all the keen servers are overloaded and are very hard to get ahold of short of phoning them.

At this point in time right now, the Keen servers bandwidth has been capped (to like half of normal)

Oh that sounds fun. Do you know exactly what keen is capping our bandwidth at? That seems like a good plan for them. Instead of promoting the popular comics to Keenspot where they would get a share in the collective gains, just shut them down so they'll have to pay for Keenprime, then they're not only provided with free content for ad revinue but also get to charge the artists for providing them with content. Talk about win/win.

I guess I'm going to have to get to work on that store and donation button if I want my comic to survive.

Ghastly · Post by **Ghastly** » Wed Jun 19, 2002 7:10 am

Kisai wrote:There are opportunities to save bandwidth by referrer checking image requests and telling bots/spyders/image harversters/direct-linkers to go take a long walk off a short pier.

This would probably help a lot. There are a number of webpages that just grab the comic images from popular comics and display them all together on their page. I've run into this a few times with my comic being displayed on other people's pages with the image being linked directly from the /comics directory.

Would it not be possible to make it so that /comics directory can't be linked to directly? That'll keep people from stealing our comics and bandwidth. Infact, if you made it so there was a single directory which can be linked to (because artists will need a way to have their advertising buttons and banners accessable from outside the Keenspace server in order to promote their comic) and then shut down direct linking to all other directories (except, of course, the .html files) that would stop image/comic theft and cut down on the bandwidth draw. That should be possible, should it not?

Post by **Kisai** » Wed Jun 19, 2002 1:25 pm

I think you misunderstood me when I said "cap"

HE.net, the upstread provider has capped keens servers to half of what they had last month, because they want to renegotiate the bandwidth costs (AKA extort more money out of us.)

There is a way to get people not to steal your images and stuff... only problem is that mod_rewrite isn't installed. (I'm bugging someone about it right now.)

Bm03 · Post by **Bm03** » Wed Jun 19, 2002 1:32 pm

Something I've been talking to Ghastly about on the KF forum is that you should try taking aboard some kind of self-serve httpads.com style system, splitting each subdomain into a seperate zone, then putting the zones into the aformentioned categories. (Defined by users or a user group if you can't stretch the staff), then putting the banner prices at a level that casual spacers like myself can buy them, as well as the rest of the world.

I'm sure that a lot of comics with cult followings can gather the donations (or own adverts, or tshirt sales, or whatever) to pay for small ad campaigns now and then, even more so if you accept paypal.

(Which reminds me- can I still pay with paypal on keenswag? I can't see any pp logos, and I'm a bit credit-card free. Speaking of keenswag, though, your signup javascript doesn't like that I live in the UK.)

The two-server thing sounds like a good idea to me, never thought of that- might be worth doing. Moving inactive comics to this server if not nuking them altogether would be a good idea.

(Obviously, you don't nuke quality comic with an extensive archive, especially if they're still getting the hits)

Comic Genesis Forums

When will Keenspace be back up? It's been almost a week!

When will Keenspace be back up? It's been almost a week!

Been having the same problem

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