BetaArchive

URL: http://www.betaarchive.com
Established: August 2006

The History

BetaArchive was opened in light of another website called OS Beta Archive (OSBA) closing down. Tension between staff and members grew to the point where the admins could take it no longer, and shut the website down. Within a few hours, BetaArchive started up and became the new home for many people. Within 2 days, the domain name "betaarchive.co.uk" was registered (changed to .com in 2010) and shortly after the site got the theme you see today.

The primary reason I started BetaArchive was at the time I wanted to manage a high traffic site. It's something that I had longed for since I opened AbyssUnderground just 2 years previously. While AbyssUnderground was popular, it was not as popular as BetaArchive became. The second reason I opened BetaArchive was because at the time of OSBA's death, I had the fastest and most popular server that was hosting files. The server was un-used at the time so I put it on long term loan to the users of the site. I did somewhat become interested in beta's myself, but not as much as some of the other enthusiasts that I know today.

"... the site ran on my server which I had at home on my broadband connection..."

Right from the beginning I had lots of people saying how quickly the site ran compared to others. There was a reason for this. Not only was I obsessed with site speed but I also had to keep the site optimised in every possible way because the site ran on my server which I had at home on my broadband connection. It was constantly "slayed" by others on the web with comments that websites should not be run on a broadband connection. Never the less, the site still achieved a 99.6% uptime record over the period of 1 1/2 years until we moved to our first dedicated server and was still equally as quick despite the load that was sometimes put upon it.

Donations

Dedicated servers don't come cheap, and at the time of the first dedicated server, I was paying for it all myself. It wasn't until 2008 that donations began covering partial costs of the server. Over the last 4 years, £2000 has been donated to the site by it's members to help pay for the server (see the donations page). Our current server has had 100% of it's costs paid for for 2 months (May 2011) now via donations.

Servers

Over 3 years we have had 4 dedicated servers until we got where we are today.

• Our 1st server was an AMD server with 1GB RAM and a 250GB HDD (I think!) which we quickly outgrew. This was hosted in USA by DediWebHost. We changed because the location wasn't very good for latency or speed. The Cogent network was fairly congested.
• The 2nd server was a Pentium 4 with 2GB RAM and a 750GB HDD. We had this server for a fairly long time until we also outgrew this one. This and subsequent servers were/are hosted at OVH. We changed because we outgrew the CPU.
• The 3rd server was a Core2Quad with 4GB RAM and 1TB HDD. We had this server for around 1 year. The primary cause for changing was lack of disk space and the HDD was also very slow, hindering performance.
• The 4th and current server (in May 2011) is a Xeon i7 with 12GB RAM and 2x1.5TB HDD's. We've only had this server for a few weeks but boy is it powerful! The current server load is about 10%.

The Geeky Stuff

During the Windows 8 leaks in April 2011...

• ... the site hit a whopping 30,565 unique visitors in 24 hours (according to Analytics) for the first leak
• ... the site went on to leak 2 more Windows 8 builds, scoring 18,772 peak visitors in 1 day the second time around
• ... the site had about 2,000 average unique visitors per day, this has doubled since the leaks
• ... the site got publicity on popular tech news sites Engadget and Neowin
• ... the site used 3TB of bandwidth in 5 days

Also...

• Basic SEO has been applied to the site in June 2010
• As of May 2011, BetaArchive has 2,000GB of files in its archive
• The site has an average bandwidth usage of 10Mbps (3TB/month) (in May 2011)
• The active userbase is about 3,000 people from 183 countries
• The top 5 most active countries in order of most visits is USA, UK, Russia, Germany and Canada

I am extremely grateful to all of the users who have made the site what it is today, and especially "mrpijey" my co-admin for his extremely hard work on the FTP server. I dread to think where we would be today without certain members. Here is hoping BetaArchive continues for many years to come!