NACOmatic: Website Suspended

rainsux

rainsux

Line Up and Wait
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rainsux
NACOmatic: Website suspended

That's the message you will receive if you visit the site.

After 2.5 years, my web-hoster has determined that PDF
files are no longer allowable content. They gave me precisely
seven (count'm 7) minutes of notice.

I am searching for a new web hoster. I push 20+ TB/month of
traffic; so the usual suspects are unaffordable. i.e. Amazon's
service would cost me north of $2,000/month ... donations
average less than $20/month. I cannot afford to cover the gap
myself.

If anyone has FIRST-HAND experience with a reliable/budget
web-hoster, I'm all ears:

nacomatic@hotmail.com
 
rainsux said:
NACOmatic: Website suspended

That's the message you will receive if you visit the site.

After 2.5 years, my web-hoster has determined that PDF
files are no longer allowable content. They gave me precisely
seven (count'm 7) minutes of notice.

I am searching for a new web hoster. I push 20+ TB/month of
traffic; so the usual suspects are unaffordable. i.e. Amazon's
service would cost me north of $2,000/month ... donations
average less than $20/month. I cannot afford to cover the gap
myself.

If anyone has FIRST-HAND experience with a reliable/budget
web-hoster, I'm all ears:

nacomatic@hotmail.com
Click to expand...
20 TB a month of traffic serving pdf files! sheesh!! That doesn't sound right...
 
The average approach plate up on airnav.com is about 200KB. So, 20TB is equivalent to serving 100M approach plates a month.

I am unfamiliar with the OP's website, and how the plates are downloaded... But I suspect the site isn't delivering 100M unique plates each month. Instead, it is probably large files containing the plates for several states at a time.

If the latter is the case, I wonder if P2P (bittorrent) type serving might be helpful to address that much traffic.


dsffdssdf said:
20 TB a month of traffic serving pdf files! sheesh!! That doesn't sound right...
Click to expand...
 
nyoung said:
The average approach plate up on airnav.com is about 200KB. So, 20TB is equivalent to serving 100M approach plates a month.

I am unfamiliar with the OP's website, and how the plates are downloaded... But I suspect the site isn't delivering 100M unique plates each month. Instead, it is probably large files containing the plates for several states at a time.

If the latter is the case, I wonder if P2P (bittorrent) type serving might be helpful to address that much traffic.
Click to expand...

Bit torrent was what I was thinking of recommending. The only problem with that is I think that he had the server dynamically put together a large pdf with approach plates with the user's selection. The problem with bit torrent is that he would then be:
A ) using tons of his own isp's bandwidth and which most isps I know would take action against that much of upload bandwidth.
B ) Even after enough people download the files and are seeding, the plates are updated after 28 days and the process would have to start all over again.
 
You might try hosting it yourself .. if you have reasonable bandwidth. Get
a static IP .. get a PC and load the server version of Linux on it (ubuntu) ..
it come's with Apache. Change the DNS registration of your website
to your static IP.

Won't use any bandwidth loading them on the server .. it'll be right
there.

RT
 
RogerT said:
You might try hosting it yourself .. if you have reasonable bandwidth. Get
a static IP .. get a PC and load the server version of Linux on it (ubuntu) ..
it come's with Apache. Change the DNS registration of your website
to your static IP.

Won't use any bandwidth loading them on the server .. it'll be right
there.

RT
Click to expand...
His connection would get destroyed if he's pushing as much traffic as he says he is.
 
If you'd like, send me a PM, I'll need to know some technical details about how your site works and how you came up with those bandwidth numbers. I might be able to come up with a solution for you. 20 T/B really is a LOT of bandwidth. Either it's being measured wrong or some changes need to be made to make the entire process more efficient.
 
Jesse,

I'm not real surprised by 20TB, it's probably the reason the FAA/NACO doesn't distribute it in the same format.

If I understand what he's doing with nacomatic (I never used the site, I have my own way) he's downloading individual approach plates and generating pdfs that correspond to states or published volumes and serving them up for people. A noble gesture but by my reckoning the bandwidth requirements are frigging huge.

The size of the volumes are:

+------+------------------------+
| vol | format(sum(pdfsize),0) |
+------+------------------------+
| AK-1 | 175,535,849 |
| EC-1 | 150,194,989 |
| EC-2 | 226,395,869 |
| EC-3 | 227,395,261 |
| NC-1 | 185,113,743 |
| NC-2 | 144,995,883 |
| NC-3 | 192,698,925 |
| NE-1 | 147,555,055 |
| NE-2 | 167,638,262 |
| NE-3 | 148,146,531 |
| NE-4 | 130,739,607 |
| NW-1 | 295,910,506 |
| PC-1 | 41,528,117 |
| SC-1 | 135,760,249 |
| SC-2 | 217,806,791 |
| SC-3 | 104,526,448 |
| SC-4 | 118,333,155 |
| SC-5 | 189,421,081 |
| SE-1 | 155,220,844 |
| SE-2 | 209,774,449 |
| SE-3 | 275,539,634 |
| SE-4 | 249,278,673 |
| SW-1 | 163,098,633 |
| SW-2 | 151,783,186 |
| SW-3 | 167,536,738 |
| SW-4 | 190,554,389 |
+------+------------------------+
That is the sum of the individual pdfs and doesn't include the overhead to combine them.

What I do is allow different ways to search and select which plates to include in the download. I still can't afford to open the site.

Joe
 
jesse said:
His connection would get destroyed if he's pushing as much traffic as he says he is.
Click to expand...

20T is a lot. Certainly you'd have to look at how they're delivered. If you're
serving up individual plates and not a whole book and limiting the size of them
I wouldn't think it would be unmanageable.

RT
 
Sounds like a client side solution is needed.

With all the problems that entails... Platform dependencies, library/DLL hell, installation issues, local security settings, etc, etc.
:sad:
 
EdFred said:
gifs are smaller than pdfs
Click to expand...
Doesn't have to be. You can get smaller then a gif with a PDF. A PDF can simply be a container for a jpeg image which is compressed and smaller then that gif would be.
 
If he is actually pushing 20TB a month on Godaddy he can count on being shut down. Their unlimited bandwidth isn't really "unlimited". I still don't think he's pushing that much bandwidth. If he is he needs to establish some kind of income through the business to pay for it.

To put 20TB into perspective -

Figure that most of the website usage happens over a 10 hour period in a single day (very realistic). That means that there are only 300 hours in a month to push this 20 terabyte per day.

20 TB spread over 300 hours = 155 megabit/second

155 megabit of bandwidth isn't cheap - even for GoDaddy. If I were to try and purchase that much bandwidth in a typical midwest data center it would be at least $5,000 per month. Even the cheapest sources of bandwidth would cost a substantial amount of money.
 
I agree 100% with Jesse. 20TB/month is an insane #. Why not package the things up on a per state basis, and per region basis (50 states + ~24 regions) and put them up on a torrent for each cycle.

This is exactly what torrents are great for... Allowing the cloud to host data that doesn't change very often. In addition to greatly reducing hosting fees, the torrent scheme would be benefit the end user because the download speeds can be extremely high. As an example, I have used other aviation websites to download regions of approach plates for my tablet PC. It works well, but I never seem to get more than about a 512kbps download rate. Meanwhile, a torrent could saturate the entire 12-15Mbps I get on the cable modem, which means an entire region could be downloaded in about 2 minutes. Nice.

Does anyone know how the FAA distribution process works? Is it free?


jesse said:
If he is actually pushing 20TB a month on Godaddy he can count on being shut down. Their unlimited bandwidth isn't really "unlimited". I still don't think he's pushing that much bandwidth. If he is he needs to establish some kind of income through the business to pay for it.
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
nyoung said:
I agree 100% with Jesse. 20TB/month is an insane #. Why not package the things up on a per state basis, and per region basis (50 states + ~24 regions) and put them up on a torrent for each cycle.

This is exactly what torrents are great for... Allowing the cloud to host data that doesn't change very often. In addition to greatly reducing hosting fees, the torrent scheme would be benefit the end user because the download speeds can be extremely high. As an example, I have used other aviation websites to download regions of approach plates for my tablet PC. It works well, but I never seem to get more than about a 512kbps download rate. Meanwhile, a torrent could saturate the entire 12-15Mbps I get on the cable modem, which means an entire region could be downloaded in about 2 minutes. Nice.

Does anyone know how the FAA distribution process works? Is it free?
Click to expand...

I have serious doubts about the feasibility of using torrents for this particular use case. 1) the number of pilots that know how to use bittorrent is presumably already low. 2) You'd have to support the ones that don't know how to use it through the process. 3) You'd have to convince a good number of them to seed (and to keep seeding) before you can get anywhere near the type of speeds that you're talking about.
 
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