As of September 2011 the paging feeds have moved web hosting providers. The resources used by the paging feeds have grown beyond the capabilities of the current hosting provider and they asked us to go.
The usage of the site has grown enormously since first set up primarily for our own use and by our own brigade(s). They are used daily by many commercial and government users and many individuals. Commercial users include most, if not all, media organisations in South Australia. Government users include staff from all emergency services in the state (especially CFS and DENR), school support staff and staff from ministers offices (among others).
Each paging feed is currently averaging:
| * Bandwidth varies from around 40GB per month in the winter months up to 130GB per month in Dec/Jan The total for the year 2010 was just short of 1TB (1000GB) of data |
| * Data rate throughout each day (24 hr period) varies from around 10k to 200k bits per second |
| * Unique visitors between 20,000 to 35,000 per month Total visitors between 50,000 to 85,000 per month |
| * Page hits between 10 - 20 million per month |
As time goes on we may well have to move hosting sites more frequently until we can find a good one that can handle the traffic at a price we can afford. The previous host was very cheap and it was not sustainable for them to continue providing the service.
These sites are currently completely free of charge to use and we would like to keep it that way however it costs real money in scanner, PDW computer etc and web hosting charges. We are considering introducing a paypal style donate link to try to offset some of the costs.
In preparation to make it easier to move in the future we are changing the URLs used to access the paging feeds. Please delete any existing bookmarks you may have and instead save the ones at the top of this page.
Each different feed comes from separate pager decoders. These are provided by people who have setup a scanner, PDW and some custom software to process and upload the decoded feed to this site.
This gives both some redundancy in the event of a single computer, internet link or web host failing and also gives users of this site a choice between which feed they prefer. There are slight differences in pager message tags and there will be the odd pager message appearing in one feed and not the other, due to PDW, as with 'real' pagers, missing the odd message.
The Live paging feeds show pager messages in near real-time. Instead of waiting up to 5-7 minutes, as in the past, to see a pager message appear on the web after it is transmitted on the paging network, this will show them generally within approximately 30 seconds.
This has two big advantages over the old way: firstly the pager messages are decoded and displayed on the web much quicker than before and, secondly, it is better suited to viewing on a mobile phone or other device where you pay for data downloaded. The reason is that rather than downloading the full file of pager messages every 5 minutes, including the pager messages already seen, only new pager messages not previously displayed are downloaded.
As before, all constructive feedback is welcomed. Some effort has been put in to only show paging groups and similar 'public' pager messages, if your individual private pager ID appears on this site and you would like it removed please send an email with the details to the site admins. Similarly if new paging groups are created that do not appear here, or you notice errors in the pager message tags, please email the site admins.
September 2011