Chiisana.net Down Until The 15th
Chiisana.net is down temporarily due to lack of bandwidth this billing month. According to their site announcement:
Due to lack of bandwidth for this billing month, we will not be distributing any more anime this billing month! The 15th of each month is the beginning of the new billing month, so we will start distributing anime again then, please come back then!
In addition, Chiisana.net’s admins answer a few oft-asked questions, like why Chiisana.net is in Japanese. So, while waiting for the 15th to come by, give the site a visit to find out the truth behind the mysterious Chiisana.net. 
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This entry was posted on Sunday, February 5th, 2006 at 7:56 pm and is filed under Direct Download Sites, Information, Resource News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
February 6th, 2006 15:25
They could use a donation plea and AdSense like you. ^__^”
I was a little dissapointed when I checked yesterday to download latest series, only to discover their bandwidth has all being used up. However, we still have more optinos to choose from. And this is certainly a good thing.
February 6th, 2006 22:15
Lol, Adsense does not allow its ads to be shown on sites which provide anime downloads, unlicensed or not. Since I run Adsense on many of my sites, I clarified this with them.
So any downloads site with Adsense is technically waiting to be banned by Google, just the way RorikonJyanai got itself banned from Adsense.
Yeah, we still have more options than before. The 15th isn’t that far away, after all.
February 7th, 2006 09:10
Rainy, you were right. Chiisana.net really did need a donation plea. Check out the site.
Since I do enjoy the service (though I don’t use it much), I’m tempted to donate… no…
February 11th, 2006 09:13
looks like chiisana.net wont be acessible to everyone
this is what they have to say ” The website will continue to be ‘offline’ mode until the new system is fully developed. The new system will be a semi-public community for people to download and share anime”
sounds it wont be for all … they talked abotu invitations … so gonna be closed loop
sad.. for more check out their website
February 11th, 2006 11:21
I’ve just checked it out, and let me tell you that I have something to say about it. I’ll probably post about this later.
Thanks for the tip.
February 12th, 2006 02:05
no worries ZMAng …. il be waiting to hear from you regarding this
cheers
February 13th, 2006 23:45
“Generally speaking, close trusted individuals, donors, and other selected individuals will have access to the first batch of accounts. Those who does not hotlink and does not share their account with others who are not suppose to have access will recieve ‘invitations’ which will allow their friends and trusted individuals to sign up for account. Rest assured, invitations will be issued generously so that circulation will continue with ease. However, it will not be issued so generously so that those leechers who does nothing other than leech will not be able to sign up.”
I guess this is the destination of most free-public anime sites. Most of those webmasters are very young (most are students), no way they can afford hundreds bucks per month.
February 14th, 2006 03:13
Well, that’s true, but I feel it isn’t right to single out so-called “leechers” when they made their service “free of charge” in the first place.
If they wanted donations to come “100% for sure”, they should have made it a pay site or an invitation site from the start.
As it is, I’m rather disappointed with the way Chiisana.net’s admins handled things.
February 14th, 2006 04:33
i second ZMAng well they should have made it pay from the start … and evn now they are making it more messy …
they say leechers and through close networks don you think people will start the leeching thing again …. thats sick for sure
am truly disapprove of this …
February 14th, 2006 08:15
I think they just didnt/couldnt know how much bandwidth would be used up. Look at mrpc, he used up 15TB per month, and that’s crazy.
February 14th, 2006 09:44
Hmm, I can only say maybe to the “not knowing” part. They said that they were charged for bandwidth overage, but well, it isn’t and wouldn’t have been difficult to set bandwidth limits to prevent that.
I have had sites that eat bandwidth over expectations, but there was always a set limit that was put in place to prevent overage. I’ll have to ask: Why wasn’t that done? Even anime-treasures.com has that rite?
Anyway, I’m probably being too harsh. So, I’ll end it here.
February 14th, 2006 14:50
Anyway, I did a whois scan and find out that they are using DreamHost. Since I’m also hosting with them, Im kind of worry if they throttle my bw or not, and here is the answer:
> Will you suspend the site automatically once the bw goes over limit?
> If not, how can I set that? Because I dont always have time to monitor
> the bw all the time, but I dont want to receive a bill with many zeros
> on it also. I hope there is some way that the site auto shut down once
> it reaches the limit.
Once reaching your bandwidth limit, you website would continue to
function and your account would incur overages unless you tell it not to.
Thankfully, you can enable what’s called bandwidth throttling. Basically
once your domain transfers a set amount of bandwidth, it’s folder will be
renamed to prevent any further usage. But it only does it 1 time a day and that
is toward the end of the day PST so even though he have it throttle you
will still have a chance at going over. To easy any uneasiness it is only
a $1 gor every GB you go over
End. Anyway, I feel their pain, and fear, of seeing a hundreds bucks bill.
February 14th, 2006 15:04
I think I’m spaaming ur blog, Zmang. But this story is kinda interesting to me, so, sumimasen.
I have just looked at their site once again, they said: “This server costs us about $250 USD every year, so your donation will help us greatly!”
Based ont the plans dreamhost are offering, my best guess is that they are on “Sweet Dream” plan, which costs around 16/month and has 1.2 TB transfer.
With a site like theirs, it’s so easy to go over 1.2 TB / month. Why didnt set the throttle? Well, once again maybe they didnt know that. Up until now I myself thought DreamHost set it up automatically for you. And even if they did set that, the bandwidth can still go over the limit on the last day.
The way they call ppl leechers, maybe because many ppl downloaded from them yet a few lent their hands when needed. I didnt download from them, so I didnt donate anything anyway ^^.
Anyway, I just want to look at everything, everyone with an open mind and open heart. They did a great job, sadly they couldnt hold it for long. ^^
February 15th, 2006 03:20
No problemo pimp. Ahh, I never thought of a WHOIS scan. Anyway, I’m familiar with Dreamhost’s practices because this very blog is hosted on Dreamhost.
So now that I know that they were actually using Dreamhost, it’s even more surprising that bandwidth throttling wasn’t enabled.
Also because of the fact that they were using Dreamhost, my cynical instincts have been piqued. As a regular Dreamhost user, I’m sure that it would be very unlikely to reach your bandwidth limits before reaching the 60 minute CPU limit set by Dreamhost!
But I guess it is possible that Dreamhost didn’t have time to suspend the account due to overuse of CPU time before BW overages were incurred.
February 15th, 2006 11:03
I see. Huhm, actually I just set mine to 970 GB yesterday (after got the instruction from them).
February 15th, 2006 12:07
That’s good, mine’s at 1TB sharp cos the accumulated BW means my total is quite a bit higher than that. But I doubt I’ll use even half of that before I reach CPU limits, but that’s probably becos of WordPress, or CMS’ in general, being more CPU intensive than normal sites.
February 18th, 2006 22:44
Wow, I never meant to cause such a huge rakus… After reading this, I feel like I owe you guys a big appologie… Anyways, lemme clear a few things up…
1) I have full intention in bringing the site back online… This is not the first time I’ve encountered with difficulities. I was originally an anonymous seeder / private http ddl before then. About half an year ago, I started this project due to lack of bandwidth (local ISP started calling me about using too much bandwidth seeding etc.) I started with an unmetered pipe with a a VPS which sets me back around 45USD per month (let’s just say I have some connections for hosting). However, due to uptime issues etc. it wasn’t really well known. Recently, around November, I was told of a real fancy story by my hosting provider, and so appearently I was billed for causing them to lose a server (!? you guess what happened yourself, I’m under NDA). I decided that I was going to be gone from distro for good, but after a lot of people poking me about it, I went with a DH account to see how things will go… just because they were cheap… or so I thought… In all cases, now that the bill is paid off, I’ll continue until I’m unevitably get hit with another big bill or something…
2) Re: Donation plea’ing, banner, etc. Personally, I _HATE_ asking for donation, and I _HATE_ banner clicking… because I don’t believe that distro should take money from people for things they didn’t do (IE: sub on their own), and if they did do it (IE: sub it themselves) they usually don’t mind distributing their own work. I’m saying the above from my own experience and from my friends’ experience (other fansubbers who I know in reallife via school). This is why you never really saw the donation button (I had it on the old grey looking site, just very unnoticable) and you never really saw advertising (I had it for about a week testing bidvertiser). Bills really were covered from my own pocket until this one hit me… Which, really, was a shame of me to had to ask for donations… And you wouldn’t believe how depressed I was for the few days while it was down and I was unsure how to pay off the bill…
3) Re: Dreamhost throttling. Here’s a real word of advice/warning for all other users. As you may or may not notice, DH updates their logs once every 24 hours for their all-integrated-panel. Their calculation tool then checks the logs on the next day. And finally, their throttle bot throttle accounts that meets the throttle limit. If you login to the panel now, you will likely see bandwidth details updated to the day before yesterday because yesterday’s log is only rotated into the system and the calculation only picked up the day before’s log. The throttle does not kick in immediately after the logs are rotated and calculated, in fact, it kicks in a few hours later. What happened is that on the billing month, my throttle was set to 850GB, and on the 2nd of Feb, I was coasting at 700GB, on the 3rd, I was coasting at 858702.55MB; which, after division by 1024MB per GB, works out to be 838GB, just a tiny bit shy of the throttle limit. The day after, up to this point, I still don’t know how it happened or how I managed, their panel claimed that I used 489989.55MB, even though their stats calculator claims I used only 200some odd GB. Throttle kicks in the later portion of the 5th which added some more bandwidth usage. Hence resulting the 293.75GB of overage. After receiving the notice about it, I emailed back and forth with DH _A_LOT_ and their billing was unwilling to back down… So, there’s the reason of the big bill and the donation plea page…
4) Re: “leecher”. Leecher is a general term us fansubbers use to refer to those people that downloads off bots/http ddl, I use it all the time with no negative connotation / intention. My sincere appolgies if you were offended by the term. I ahd no intention what so ever in harming anyone’s feeling by using that term.
5) Re: invitational only setup. Due to the bill, I’m skipping a few meals this up coming month. However, being the skinny geek that I am, I don’t have as much weight as certain south park character to survive on only body fat… hence, I am being extremely careful this month. After things go live again, I am looking at about sending out first batch of invitation to around 35 people, each with 3 or more invitations attached to it. This means we’re looking at least 140 ish people in the first week or two. Bandwidth will be monitored carefully as to how the numerics sum up. I will discuss with my associate as to how often we will issue new invitations until the system cannot accept more accounts. At which point, if budgets allow, we will get another account or a full dedicated with more bandwidth / space. The invitation system does not mean people will be un-able to download at all, but instead, just slightly more restrictive so the hotlinkers and heavy users will be more limited as to how much they can affect other users. If the admin here — ZMAng if I’m not mistaken — wishes for it, please feel free to contact me via dmca(a)chiisana (you know what extension) with email addresses of 9 faithful readers here. I’ll include your email addresses in the first batch of invitation as token of appreciation and appologie.
6) Age factor… Well, as much as I hate to say it, I am of age, and I’m a student / freelance web application developer. So on usual cases, I can cover my bills no problem. I’m not some random kid that stole his folks credit card and get hosted for a few weeks then get boot off because the folks discovered the credit card bill and issued charge back =]
7) Admin(s)… Generally speaking, I’m the only person who run the site; but there is another being located in Asia who helps me with updating on very rare occations, as well as letting me of new updates so I can update the site… He did give a huge loan for this incident as well, but I’ve already paid him back because I pulled a huge sum from my chequing account to paypal in case the donations did not cover the bill. I would like to use this moment to thank him, and all the other donors for the support.
7) Additional questions/concerns? Please feel free to contact me! I’d be more than glad to answer your question/concerns for you! I will not, however, unfortunetly, answer to invitation requests other than from ZMAng. My contact is dmca(a)chiisana (you know the extension). Even though strictly speaking, that address is used for copyright complaints etc. from the artist’s publisher, I am allowing general contact on there for the time being so I can coordinate with people. I’ll put up a small forum or a shoutbox or something alike in the future in the new system so I can be reached easier.
That’s all for now… hopefully the above will sort out a few things…
February 18th, 2006 23:12
Oh, another note…
File downloading directly does not require much CPU / memory resource on it own. However, part of the reason with the multistep phase in of the new system is that I’m doing a new download system which — hopefully — will be adopted by a few more http DDL providers (MrPC already showed interest, and I’ll be meeting him personally and discuss some more functionality when time allows for both of us). This new system will be 100% impossible to hotlink as it will utilize multiple securtiy methods as well as no public accessable unprotected files (*cough*e107*cough*), as well as queue system etc. The pitfall with this is that it requires some interesting cpu/memory management before it rings a bell for DH. If you try fopen + fread alone on your account with a 170mb anime, you will notice the load average spike to 50++ with just one concurrent download session. The partial phase in will allow me to better test this script and find a good number of concurrent sends without causing spikes (currently, with resources I have accessable at home, two PCs works fine).
DH does NOT and WILL NOT suspend accounts due to bandwidth overage, unless you opt to not pay the bill on your billing date (for me, it was the 15th). The more bandwidth you use, the more money they make. They will not suspend you for that. They will, however, temporarly lock your site up if someone on your server complains about having no CPU resource and you are using @#$%load of CPU resource. I know this because another friend of mine had his account chown’ed by DH so that apache cannot access that directory until he recitify the issue…
Anyways, that’s offtopic I guess…
PS: I also noticed a typo on my URL in the first post… oh wells, that’s no biggy… Any of the distros who knows me will know that this is my speech pattern/style and this is indeed me posting about my site =]
February 19th, 2006 00:12
Arghh, this is where my trigger-happiness has reared its ugly head. With the unbelievably detailed explanations you have given - which, by the way, are really a bonus rather than a necessity for us leechers - I have to offer my sincerest apologies for any negative comments towards you that have appeared on this post.
On the subject of Dreamhost, I understand that bandwidth throttling is laggy (like all of their statistics packages for that matter), but I raised my arguments over your overage charges and your BW throttling because I truly doubted that would be possible to incur overages at Dreamhost without reaching their 60 minute CPU time ceiling. With your explanation, I finally understand why you never reached your CPU limit first, i.e. because you weren’t using a PHP download script (like e107) to handle your downloads. I also thought that if you had a PHP download script employed, you could impose another layer of BW throttling. I apologize that I never bothered considering that you didn’t utilise a download script.
Actually, I used to hit Dreamhost’s CPU limit all the time when I was using it to transfer open source files, but I guess that was because of the PHP download script employed. So, it was probably just me bringing my own experience over and mashing it up with someone elses - which is clearly completely wrong.
And I fully understand your dislike for asking donations (especially when you’re talking about co-located or personally owned servers because if you were to shut down your DDL site, you would still be able to keep your donor-paid upgrades), but not for advertising - since I run advertising on most of my blogs. But I have to admit that advertising is pretty difficult to implement for direct download sites since the only way you’ll get someone to click is to force them to do it - which I don’t like either.
Personally, what I really dislike is what I call the “double-combo” - using both donations and advertising, yet not including your advertising gains into your total income - leaving you with net profit if your donations pay for all costs. I’ve seen this on a couple of direct download forums, but since I lack real data, I’m not going to talk to much about it and let my trigger-happiness screw me over again.
So, it seems that I got unnecessarily worked up over an impassioned announcement. I guess I should have considered the impact of a $293 overage bill on anyone before blasting you off.
And thank you for the offer for invitations, but I do not believe that I deserve the opportunity to receive or allocate any given my rather unnecessary and harsh remarks on your service based on just one announcement. I’m quite sure some of my readers will want to kill me for saying this, but… I suggest that you reserve your invitations to those that actually helped you out during your troubles.
Thanks for the time and effort you spent typing such a long explanation and apology over here, and for the offer too.
P.S.: I corrected your email address on your first post, so no problem there.
February 19th, 2006 10:31
First and foremost, thank you for your understanding. There is no need for apology from your end as I did not outline the details in such detailed form in my initial announcement. Miscommunication / misunderstanding is certainly the most common lead to unpleasant relationships. I will be sure to be more detailed in my announcements in the future.
At this time, I would like to say that, after some calculation, I realized that I can take a bit more than 35 kick off users. And due to lack of better candidates source to get the words out, the offer for the initial batch of invitations will still stand. I think there are still room for 5 to 10 accounts with invitations attached. If anyone wishes a first batch invitation, please feel free to contact me at the contact email listed in the above reply, be sure to mention that you read about it on ZM’s blog, and I’ll be sure to include you in the first batch. I will also go to MrPC’s forum later and offer a similar offer. Once the spaces are filled up, I’ll post back or let everyone know via email reply or something. =]
Cheers!
February 19th, 2006 12:35
Chiisana, I dont know how fread and fopen can use too much of your CPU just for 1 download, it works okie for me. BTW, you dont need to worry too much about CPU load actually, CPU-minutes is the thing you should worry about. I have experience with it, if you want I can help.
BTW, MRPC is on dedicated hst, he can use if I remember correctly he can pretty much use some apache mod to do such things without the use of PHP
February 19th, 2006 13:24
Pimp
In php4, and php5, file handles are not using mmap function. This ultimately makes fopen + buffered fread process resources not only cpu intensive but also disk process intensive. This is because each time a buffered chunk is called, php loads that segment into ram / aux. buffer memory, and then deliver the content. This ultimately lead to a — perhaps false positive — high load average, especially if you are using php as cgi as recommended by DH. When I first started to code the module, I used 64kb buffered fread, and the load average I got was around 100 (well, it was 103 or something, but I rounded down) with just me calling that script. I quickly killed it and it fall back down to around 2 (which I’m not impressed because DH claims that value to be normal >_>). With php5, a new function called stream_copy_to_stream was introduced (or so it says on http://php.net/stream_copy_to_stream even though I heard from another person who said it works for php 4.0.1.3 as well). This function uses mmap and thus provides better resources management. I’ve tested this function on the very same dh account which gave me the high load average, and it seems to work okay with just a 0.2 load average increase. I’ll continue to see about what I can do to make things better.
As for MrPC… I know him, almost personally… I know his server… I’ve been in his server as root… Even after giving him the .htaccess I used (which utilizes mod_rewrite to do referrer checking and mod_bandwidth to limit concurrent transfer rate etc.), the load averages are still litterally screaming for help. We’re talking about regular 30++ load average. I hope, with proper configuration of my new script, his server’s load average will decrease to a more acceptable sum. I guess I’m just a number freak =] But I really hate math in real life… especially class environments xD
Anyways, this is way off topic from the original blog entry. If anyone is interested for further discussion about coding or distro script or server config etc. feel free to email me so we don’t keep on spamming ZM’s blog =]
Cheers.
February 22nd, 2006 00:44
hazzzah hi alfy, look me you and mrpc sites in the blog, cool xD i wonder if i know who runs this blog
February 22nd, 2006 06:43
Lol, probably not.
February 25th, 2006 03:43
I know a few ZM’s from different MMOs, but I doubt I know this ZM in particular :p
February 26th, 2006 10:41
Hehe, true enough, though I did play quite a few MMOGs in the past.