To everybody in the FSCommunity, my apologies. For the second time BirdsEyeView website has exceeded it's daily alloted bandwidth in spite of the fact that I thought we had taken all necessary precautions to elliminate this problem. With over 150,000 hits since the start of the day and with many folks downloading the much smaller videos that we had posted it appears that we quickly burned up bandwidth. Of course this is offered only as an explaination and not an excuse. My hope is that you'll be patient and bear with us. www.flightsim-bevs.com will be back on line a little after 12 midnight Pacific Time.Again, my apologies...Stephen R [email protected]

This is probably a dumb suggestion, but, from my simpleton's point of view, it seems to me it's important that your site be at least visible to some degree at all times. To solve this problem, and, again, I know you've thought about this a whole lot more than me so sorry if this is stupid, but perhaps you should consider having two websites (that look like one), one for your site so people can check out at least the pics and descriptions, and one for the videos. I'm not sure how to make that work invisibly but it's a thought. That way, if the videos and large downloads site goes down, at least people can still visit your site, and you can explain what happened from your own site instead of having to post here and elsewhere to apologize. Because, man, when you release, you are dead!!! :-) (I think that's a good thing :-))Good luck,Thomas

Actually, that has been in the works, but some of the logistics as I understand it won't be in place till the 12th. My guess is that short term the videos will be pulled till the new service is ready. If Stephen had seen the uptick in demand hit today about the same time as the Avsim front page announcement, he would have pulled the videos sooner so as too have prevented the whole site from going down.If it is any consolation, the Flight1 servers will be handling the actual distribution of BEV.Tony=http://www.flightsim-bevs.com]

Yes, as Tony said - we stress that purchasing BEV will be through Flight1.com, not from our website or servers - no chance of them going down in a hurry.I have to accept responsibility for this outage again - I had made a mental note to pull the 45MB video, before the AVSIM release went live, but forgot to. With 150,000 visits all downloading images and videos, I guess it was inevitable.Please bear with us while we go through these "growing pains" as a small startup. I know Stephen has spent a lot of time over the past few weeks trying to find a reasonable cost technical solution for a media server, but that won't be ready until the 12th.Thanks for your patience.

Thank you for explaining the problem. Can't wait for the release!:-) Best regards,Bill Worth

I hope you consider Flight1 for distribution of your products. If they can deliver UT USA they can deliver anything! Bob... :)Look forward to your release!

>I hope you consider Flight1 for distribution of your>products. If they can deliver UT USA they can deliver>anything! >>Bob... :)>>Look forward to your release!>>Well to be honest BEV Volume 1 will only be around a 50MB download, so it won't stress the Flight1.com servers very much.Thanks for your understanding guys, we really appreciate it. The site will be up again (minus videos) in approx. 6 hours from the time of this post.

The website is back up again and we have videos available for downloading at between 150-300KB/sec, which is 20x faster than before. Thanks for your patience while we were offline.

I think you still may want to consider what I suggested. When people are going to purchase, they are going to want to check out your main site to figure out if they really want it. Then they will download the videos and crash you again. IOW, you don't want to totally go down again because people are downloading too many videos. It's bad enough when people can't get the videos, but when the whole site is down, not good. As a customer myself, even if the videos become unavailable, I'm still going to want to see the rest of the site. Look what happened on announcement of final beta. Now imagine the interest generated on first day of sale. True, you'll be able to service the sales through Flight1, but (I think anyway), lots of people are going to want to access your site, too.Not to beat a dead horse, but I will anyway, I was listening to a bank executive today explain that they were prepared for Katrina in terms of their data, but they weren't prepared for the loss of communication across the company and with their customers, and that hurt them immensely. Not the same scale, true, but the lesson I think is still there.Thomas

Hi Thomas,You have some good points. Fortunately, what you are suggesting is what is being implemented. The videos will all be on a separate site and host. Should the main site go down at some point after BEV is released, support could even be offered through Simforums, Flight1's official support forums. Avsim and other sites have forums that support payware products as well, so that could be a possibility. We can try to anticipate what will happen, but in the end, who knows? Even veteran companies with many releases under their belt such as PMDG have still managed to get their site and even Avsim shut down with the 747 release. They are not the only ones, just the most recent.At least what BEV is doing is not near as important as a banking company, but I understand where you are coming from. You should have seen some of the forums discussions we have had behind the scenes at BEV about this. ;) Keep in mind that even though there are a few of us out here spreading the word and answering questions, BEV is essentially a one man operation, with the pocket book and operating capital to match. :) We really appreciate your input, Thomas, and I know you would not go to all the trouble in posting here if it wasn't for the fact you want BEV to succeed. Thanks for your support! :)Tony=http://www.flightsim-bevs.com]

Stephen-Great looking stuff. I am very excited about it.I enjoyed reading your bio in "about me".I wish you great success-and not too much complaining!http://mywebpages.comcast.net/geofa/pages/rxp-pilot.jpg

Thanks to everyone for your patience, suggestions, and understanding. We have now put BEVs videos on a separate server and our daily allocation of 10GB of Bandwidth is more than enough to handle the traffic we expect during the release period. For those interested or who have concerns, I offer the following statistics from our server:Sept 09 - 391,831 hits - 17.93 GB Bandwidth - videos on the same serverSept 10 - 378,407 hits - 5.75 GB Bandwidth - videos on a separate serverAs you can see, with nearly the same amount of hits, by putting the videos on a separate server we have cut the Bandwidth in half. Again...thank you all for you're input.Stephen [email protected]