Right now, there are three options for blogging platforms:

The trouble is, this is no longer really a blog. Sure, it’s structured like one, and we (including the authors) still think of it as mostly Dave and Derek writing whatever’s on their mind, like a blog, but from a functional standpoint that’s no longer the case. Game threads are much more like any active BB/community site, and the site as a whole falls into a more traditional web-publishing content-management mold. In other words, limiting yourself to looking at alternative blog software misses the point. A site that has thousands of readers and gets hundreds of updates in the course of a three-hour span isn’t a typical blog. You don’t see Slashdot trying to run on WordPress, no matter how much hardware they have at their disposal.

If the problem really is CPU-related, then the solution is probably going to be limiting the amount of processing needed. And that probably means limiting comments to “last 50″ or something similar on the 51+ length threads.

Right, and traditional CMS/web-publishing systems have support for that kind of “paged” view built in (for their commenting systems and whatever else). It’s been a while since I looked at the state of the art in free software in this category, but I know a couple of years ago Joomla and Drupal were the standard-setters, with the *Nuke (including DotNetNuke on the Windows side) variants trying to unseat them. But I really have no idea now.

Your site is probably similar in traffic to Hardball Times, and I think they have a dedicated server (which I guess they lease, along with all the backups, upgrades, and whatever else they get out of the deal). I’ve never seen their site experience a problem.

Might be worth talking to studes about what he’s doing…

As to “losing control of the site”….that wouldn’t be an issue. I have been thinking of something I could do with the rest of my server resources, and thought this would be a worthwhile contribution.

If you’re interested, hit me up, if not just let me know, either way its cool.

But if there is a way to safely implement something that allows use of those free resources without risking sabotage, it has promise. The colocating scheme that hincandenza mentions in #46 and earlier looks promising to me. If there were 4 (or more, if possible)proxy hosts in the scheme and one crashed or its owner wanted to pull out of USSM, there would be lots of other capacity.

I reiterate that I am not currently a tech guy, though I was one in my earlier career back when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Right now, there are three options for blogging platforms:
Wordpress
Movable Type
Expression Engine

Movable Type has improved, but you’re either generating static pages or you’re running in PHP just like WordPress. It’s not an improvement over WordPress.

Expression Engine is getting to be pretty solid, but I can’t think of any major sites running it as a blog, only some personal sites. It’s really more CMS than blog.

If the problem really is CPU-related, then the solution is probably going to be limiting the amount of processing needed. And that probably means limiting comments to “last 50″ or something similar on the 51+ length threads. I’m not sure cloud computing would help, really, not without actually moving the DB into the cloud itself. Or, at least moving frequently-used files into the cloud to get them off the server, e.g. images.

The best and worst of 2008 season within 15 minutes.

That’s entirely possible, and please, take our word — it’s not because we want to be rude. Our record on answering email is not stellar. Our inbox is generally filled with support requests for failed password resets, link exchange begging, PR spam, random questions from people who own M’s in fantasy leagues… it’s crazy.

I can only imagine, totally understandable. I sent you another email about it a couple hours ago. It had “hosting USS Mariner” in the subject line. Is there a better way to get in touch with you for this type of thing?