Saturday, September 21, 2013

SteamLevel

SteamLevel.com Forwards Here.

SteamLevel was a site for comparing gamer profiles on Valve's Steam digital distribution platform.

The primary reason I wrote SteamLevel was to be able to decide what game to play at LAN parties with my friends. We could add all the people there to the search list and it would generate a big table of all our games, making it easy to see which ones we all had.

But hosting a web application is expensive. There was no ad revenue and not many users. I tried Amazon sponsered links to games, but that just felt like a slap in the face to my users, who were there because of Steam, not Amazon's digital distribution platform.

But the real problem was that I had heavily cached everything. So it took gobs of memory. And web hosts really hate to give you memory. Memory turns out to be the hardest thing to increase. It's easier to get a dozen CPU cores than it is to get more than 4GB of memory, and my host had capped me at 2GB. I was hosed. The application needed a rewrite to even continue using that web host and anything with more memory was 10x as expensive. I just really didn't want to pay that much for hosting. it would have been cheaper to buy my own box and upgrade my ISP to business class.

So SteamLevel is down, indefinitely.

It may get resurrected at some point. I still own the domain. But not today. Sorry.

1 comment:

  1. I thought about doing that actually, but while I was proud of the site and its functionality I really wasn't very proud of the code. It was hack after hack that grew organicly without a good design. It really wasn't something I wanted to represent my coding ability. It was just something I whipped up in a few weeks to learn some new technologies.

    At the time I was learning Spring 3.0, but now Spring 3.2 is actually significantly easier to use. I might just get inspired to try out Spring Boot or DropWizard... If I do, I'll be sure to put it on GitHub, probably under the Apache license (not a big fan of GPL).

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