The ONB website is hosted at hostingplex.com and is physically located in Toronto. It is maintained by me, David Fellows. It is backed-up by virtue of the fact that pages are first created or stored on my computer and then uploaded. My computer has a complete copy of the pages on the public site with a couple of exceptions. It is backed up daily. My copy of the site is kept in a form that permits retrieving earlier versions of pages that have been updated.
Each of the three clubs has access to a subdirectory in which they maintain their own club pages. I keep an eye open for copyright violations, illegal content and space use. Other than that the clubs are responsible for their own content, format, and backup.
I am currrently purchasing the web services directly. The expenses are approximately $25.00 for domain name registration (down from previous years) and approximately $60 (depending on the CAD/USD exchange rate) for hosting services per year . This is still the cheapest package I can find.
There is, of course, a person cost. I devote perhaps 25 hours a year to updating, creating new pages, and fixing up other people's submissions.
I have made the detailed statistics for October 2006 available on the website. They are more-or-less typical. You can compare them with the the October 2005 statistics.
The bottom-line statistics are this
| What we pay for | What we use | |
|---|---|---|
| Bandwidth | 4.0GBytes/month | 0.75GBytes/month |
| Disk Space | 200MBytes | 47MBytes |
| Services | Many | 2 mailing lists |
| Databases | 1 | 0 |
Among the tidbits I find interesting is the fact that we spend twice as much bandwidth sending our pages to the internet search engines for indexing than we do for sending them to people for viewing. I think we can assume that our site is well indexed.
Our use of disk space has nearly doubled in a year. Mostly used for huge ONB Notes pdf files. Likewise the use of bandwidth has also doubled, probably largely due to ONB Notes. At the currrent rate of growth we will have to upgrade our hosting plan in 2008.
The executive did not act on motion 11.3 of the 2005 AGM.
Nonetheless I implemented a What's New service for the web site. This service is available in three forms: as a web page linked off the ONB home page, as an RSS feed, and as an email service. It has had technical problems from time-to-time. It does not appear to be used very much.
I also set up a discussion list for the board of directors. Technically, it functions. Operationally, it perhaps could be used more effectively.
The hosting service had some technical difficulties this fall as a result the web site was up and down like a yo-yo for a while. This seems to have been resolved.
I hav put up a number of pages on request. A few requests seem to have turned to shale in my inbox. Sorry. I think all have been posted now except one - see below.
I have had requests to post a number of odds-and-ends (logos for example) that don't really fit anywhere. My current thinking is to create a "junk box" page and put links to them there. I am also thinking of wrapping them in zip archives to distinguish them from pages that are intended for public consumption.
Putting maps on the site has also been mentioned. This seems unwise.
David Fellows, Webmaster
November 10, 2006