OnlinePhim.net Blog

It’s been awhile since the last update. So here’s a quick overview of what happened since then.

1. The hosting server had a harddrive crashed on us. Thousands of people accessing the same machine at the same time will do that. That’s why thousands of videos are currently offline.
2. The staffs were super busy with various other projects.
3. Most of our volunteers were on vacations.
4. Low on funding. People don’t donate as much as they used to.  What ever little we get from advertising is countered by the fact that most people use ad-blockers or rarely click on ads.

We’re currently looking for alternative hosting options to rebuild our collection. We will add new video series first before retroactively update older videos. Stay tuned for more updates.

It’s been awhile since I’ve written the last blog post. Many things have changed and many have stayed the same. I’d like to take a moment to go over the current situation. Over the past 4 years, we’ve been bringing you latest in Asian entertainment. We came online when there were only a handful of websites available. As the traffic increased, we struggled to keep the site running. As anyone who have followed us from the beginning should know, we’ve tried pretty hard. If you’re a newcomer, you can always read the old posts if you have some times. At the peak of our service, we have about 2500 – 3000 people viewing videos, and about another 1000 viewing the forums … at the same time.

Of course, the landscape is much different now. We have thousands of clone sites and hundreds pop up every day. However, decent sites are still few and far in between. We’ve heard quite a few stories about getting viruses, spywares and bombardments of popup/popunder ads just by visiting some of those sites. Those whose appreciate us, continuing to support us for our effort.

Since the last time that we were down, we’ve received numerous emails about possible solution about our current growing pains. The majority of you suggested that we incorporate some sort of nominal fee to pay for the resources. Some suggested that we should limit the amount of time a visitor can view a video series as not taken up all the resources, and free them up for other people to view. Some offered to help with the techincal aspects and well as volunteer to update videos. All in all, we’d like to thank all for your suggestions and supports.

So, in order to keep the site running and for future growth, we have decided to incorporate a “premium” features for contributors. For those you are willing to help us out, you’ll get the following:

• Early access to videos. You can view videos a couple weeks before the general public.
• Skipping around videos. You will be able to skip past the intro, jumping back and forth within videos. (* depends on video type)
• Exclusive contents. You will get access to contents that will not be available to the general public.
• Access lab features. Test out new beta features that we are working on before we make them public.

More information will be posted soon. Meanwhile, we will move the server to a faster one by the end of the month. Stay tuned.

As you might have noticed, our server is pretty much down for last couple days. It’s actually not down, but it’s unreliable enough that it’s might as well be. The reason being is that with the influx of new viewers, the server was unable to handle all requests. This problem compounds with the previous one made the site highly unusable.

This started out as a fun little project, but  2 1/2 years later, this turns into a big network that requires lots of time and effort to maintain. Not to mention the monetary requirement for the upkeep. The staffs and I are currently debating whether it’s worthwhile to go on operating these sites or to close up shop permanently. If you’d like to join the conversation and make your voice heard, just leave your comments, suggestions, etc … here, on facebook, myspace … etc (anywhere you feel comfortable with) … and we’ll take them into consideration. Whatever will happen, we’d like to thank all our loyal and generous members who have supported us over the years, you’re the ones that make it all possible. THANK YOU!

Update 7/27/09: So far, the consensus is that the majority of the effort should not be concentrating to OP/OD upkeep since it’s requiring more and more work just to keep the sites going. It means that the sites will continue to run their natural courses without any major upgrade in the foreseeable future.

P.S. On a side note, we’ve worked out plans for a simpler, more streamlined project that enable higher quality viewing. It’s actually an older project that meant to be OP version 2, but later split into a different path because it uses a different underlining architecture. The forthcoming website will most likely geared toward contributors at first with invitations to other loyal members coming right after. Unlike the openness that we currently adopted, the closed system enable us to better management of resources.

Update 7/31/09: Some viewers have contacted us asking for the possibility of making older videos available again. As you might have known that since we don’t own/have access to a big network of servers, chances for videos older than a month being alive when you wanted to watch them is pretty slim. One possible solution is renting a cheaper, albeit slower, secondary server to use as auxiliary host. So if you need to finish up a few episodes for an interesting series that you have to watch, someone can move the files there for you to view. To be fair, only contributors will have access to this server as not to burn up all the system resources. Let us know if this something you’ll like us to proceed with.