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Disabling free accounts - Not the way to go IMO

Posted: Wed Aug 11, 2010 3:06 am
by hmmwhatsthisdo
The title pretty much says it all.

Running a website costs money. I understand that. When you don't have enough money, bad things happen, and good things have to go away. I understand that too. But, when I saw this, I had a "Sad Panda Moment". This is taking away all the good things to stop one bad thing. There must be some other way to do this!

Here's a thought: You [Aaron] said that registrations were taking up most of the server's overhead. Why not limit or disable them? For example, only allow 0 or 1 registration per account. Any more must be bought at a predetermined price. You [Aaron] could perhaps post on the SS blog that anyone using Sipgate or Gizmo can use a service like IPKall instead, which contacts the SS servers (instead of the SS servers registering with them), cutting down on overhead. This could alleviate the problem of limited server resources (for now) until enough donations can be scraped together to upgrade the server.

Re: Disabling free accounts - Not the way to go IMO

Posted: Wed Aug 11, 2010 3:59 am
by Aaron
Even taking away the gizmo and sipgate registrations would be a brief respite, within another month or two the load on the server would be back to dangerous load levels and the same situation would be reached.

The rate at which donations have been arriving to date, about USD1,000 has been donated 90% of which was in the first few weeks, mean they are unlikely to ever even reach the USD2,500/year it costs to run the existing sipsorcery dedicated server let alone upgrade it. And that's also disregarding what's going to happen in July next year when another USD2,500 is required to keep the server going for another year...

Re: Disabling free accounts - Not the way to go IMO

Posted: Wed Aug 11, 2010 4:42 pm
by hmmwhatsthisdo
I meant all registrations from all clients, period. Even still, those few months may be what is needed to figure something out. Perhaps you could insert ads (non-intrusively, perhaps between the titlebar and the app itself) into the SIP Sorcery application to generate revenue.

Re: Disabling free accounts - Not the way to go IMO

Posted: Tue Aug 17, 2010 8:02 pm
by hmmwhatsthisdo
I added a poll, so that everyone can see the public opinion the matter. I'm kind of interested in what the SS community thinks of this.

Re: Disabling free accounts - Not the way to go IMO

Posted: Tue Aug 17, 2010 10:55 pm
by Aaron
I'll be interested as well. I'll be even more interested in the alternative ideas as to how it accounts could have stayed open.

In regards to advertising the mysipswitch site used to have Google AdWords but the revenue was negligible.

Re: Disabling free accounts - Not the way to go IMO

Posted: Fri Aug 20, 2010 12:59 am
by VoipDude
What is the total number of registered users of SipSorcery?

Re: Disabling free accounts - Not the way to go IMO

Posted: Fri Aug 20, 2010 1:38 am
by Aaron
It depends what you mean by registered users? Do you mean the number of users with a SIP device registered or the number of people that signed up for a sipsorcery account?

Re: Disabling free accounts - Not the way to go IMO

Posted: Sat Aug 21, 2010 12:25 am
by VoipDude
I mean the number of users with a SIP device registered.

Re: Disabling free accounts - Not the way to go IMO

Posted: Sat Aug 21, 2010 3:04 am
by Aaron
Just under 3000.

Re: Disabling free accounts - Not the way to go IMO

Posted: Sun Aug 29, 2010 9:32 pm
by hmmwhatsthisdo
Is there a certain part of SS that takes up the most resources? I know you said something about VSP registrations, but is there another part of SIP Sorcery that takes up a considerable amount of resources?