I'm going to be implementing two things this week for a website. One will be a Top Sites script, the other will be a banner ad rotation script. I'm looking to get last-minute feedback about the best way to go.

For the Top Sites, I'm thinking of going with Top Sites Pro from www.solutionscripts.com It's not cheap ($250 or so) but seems to be very high-quality.

As for the banner ad one, I'm torn between Central Ad and WebAdverts. I'm going to be serving up around 15,000 impressions a day. Cost isn't too much of an issue but I want something that's easy to work with. I'm running IIS on NT if that matters.

Any and all feedback would be appreciated.

15,000 Ads??? Your best bet is too look for a MYSQL or ASP option (parsing from a DNS file). That is way too many ads to handle for both Central Ads and Web Adverts.

Your bandwidth will sky rocket, and your web visitors won't return due to broken images and delayed downloading time with a flat file ads system.

Regards,

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Eliot Lee....
Former Handle: Eliot
Anthro TECH, L.L.C
anthrotech.com
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There's a pretty nice mysql/php banner rotater at http://www.htmlwizard.net/phpAds/

[Edit - dammit, I keep forgetting that this older version of UBB doesnt auto-hyperlink ]

I've only very briefly played with it, but it looked nice. Havent tried it in production, but php and mysql are going to be quicker than webadverts any day.

Webadverts is a decent enough program, but is a HUGE system hog.

--mark

[This message has been edited by Mark Badolato (edited May 02, 2000).]

Thanks mucho for all the help. A couple follow-ups:

1. 15,000 ads a day doesn't seem like that much. That breaks down to about 450,000 impressions a month which is by no means a big website. Based on what I've heard I think that most ad programs should be able to handle this.

2. As for the MySQL/PHP stuff, I'm running on IIS and I'm not sure about any issues there. I guess one thing I am looking for is somewhat of a "Turnkey" solution. I'm willing to pay a little more for something that I can install easily and don't have to do a lot of configuration with.

Finding good BB software was easy (UBB), finding a good directory software was easier (Links!), finding good banner ad software has been a royal pain in the...

1) Let me give you an example (because you're not getting it)...WebAdverts, like Mark mentioned, is bandwidth and server resource intensive...I have 9 banners in my WebAdverts banner exchange...The nonssi.log log file grows at about 2,000K per day. And the average size of the log files for each banner is about 5,000K. Now do the math...

15,000 - 9 = 14,991 Banners
14,991 X 2,000 bytes = 29,982,000 bytes (30 MGs)
29,982,000 X 365 days = 10,943,430,000 (10 Gigs)
14,991 X 5,000 bytes = 74,955,000 (74 MGs)

Total Disk Space for 1 Year: 10.104 Gigs

This only addresses the issue of disk space. It does not address CPU usage or impacts on Memory.

2) You can install the MySQL package in NT servers -OR- as mentioned before you can use ASP (Active Server Pages) that connect to a DSN file created out MSAccess.

Regards,


------------------
Eliot Lee....
Former Handle: Eliot
Anthro TECH, L.L.C
anthrotech.com
* Check Resource Center
* Search Forums
* Thinking out of the box (codes) is not only fun, but effective.




[This message has been edited by AnthroRules (edited May 03, 2000).]