Letter #3 - Insiider:

My question is about Insiider.com. I want to know how much space it takes to host Insiider.com (and the forums) and how much it costs to do so. I am also wondering how the site was made (HTML, Java, whatever else). Any information in those areas would be great. Thanks.

-Chainstaff

Answer by Jim Wong:

Insiider is a rather large site, to tell you the truth. The site currently takes up 34.1 megabytes, and that's not everything you see online as well, there are a whole lot of unused images so far (and who knows, they might never be used). That also doesn't count the bandwidth usage, and the forums takes up a whole lot of that as well. This is why it's necessary to have a really large server.

Every year of hosting on this rather large server is $150. The site itself was made in Dreamweaver 3.0 and 4.0. It's mostly SHTML (which makes it a whole lot easier to update stuff like the toolbars on the side or whatnot), and a little flash animation here and there.

If you take a look up top at the menu bars like "MENU :::: etc." or the one with the Potomac Distribution advertisement, you'd notice they are on almost every single page of the site. If the site was in HTML, and I didn't know too much about coding, whenever I changed any of those bars, I woulid have to go and change the same thing in every single page with those. Fortunately, there are things called "Includes", which lets me edit a different shtml file out of the normal site and it would magically fix the rest. Hope thats clear enough.