Skippy sky update, no activity?

[mark3d]

Hey Andrew, have you considered running the data crunching on a Virtual Private Server? $25 per month at Gandi, Amazon Web Services, or Azure, gets you at least a dedicated core and massive bandwidth which might be enough to take the load off your local PC and internet connection. (Of course, I suggest this in complete ignorance of the requirements to run the site... it might need more CPU cores or RAM, so the price might be higher.)

Either way, with worldwide usage and such an innovative site, if you can't cover your costs no one could fault you for considering a freemium model - the site coastalwatch.com.au provides surf predictions for a couple of days in advance for free, but people need to pay ($80 per year) to get the more long range forecasts.

[andrew_d_cool (Andrew)]

Originally Posted by Amaranthus

Seems to have stopped updating again...

(Maybe the algorithm is taking a break in the 'sin bin' for forecasting a cloud-free night at Stockport Observatory for last night, only to have the clouds roll in and intermittently disturb proceedings before closing it out at 11pm )

Hi Barry,

The good folks at NOAA in the USA, who supply the GFS model data that SKippySky uses, changed the name of their server by putting in an extra
".i." in the midle of the server name, which caused many headaches at in early May until I figured out what they'd done.

Updates for SkippySky depend on the NOAA servers running, on Telstra Bigpond running, on my own PC running, and lastly on my webhost's computers running OK. So there's a long chain where things can go wrong, and almost all of it is beyond my control.

Oh, I forgot to add, sometimes my teenagers chew up all our Internet quota, which throttles the download speed!!

Regards,

Andrew Cool
www.skippysky.com.au

[Amaranthus (Barry)]

You do a great job Andrew. You need to worry when people stop complaining when it's not up