Tom-
I was only funnin' about the contribution, but we truly appreciate the offer.
Gunslinger-
Quick corrrection and long explanation comin'.
"Since it's infancy, TFL has been a large financial burden?" On who? When did you ever hear such complaints? Even now, we're not complaining about the server costs...it goes with the responsibility of the site. The only time we've ever brought up TFL costs is:
1) In response to direct questions such as Tom's
2) When individuals have attempted to use the bandwidth to promote personal products.
3) When individuals have attempted to use the TFL name, without our knowledge, to hawk vendors for discounts, gifts and kickbacks.
I know you like EZ Board for your site. EZ-Board is a fine system. And it's free, I know. But I've heard tales of sites as large as ours being forced to archive and delete old messages due to disk space limitations. I also hear that it experiences frequent slow downs. We've never liked the advertisements that come with less expensive alternatives (nor do the Members)....basically, I think you get what you pay for.
When it comes to TFL and similar sites, there are two costs:
Storage and Bandwidth.
Storage:
Our data files for the posts alone are over 200MB; add in Membership and sundry data files, programs, image files and room for backup and you're well over half a gig. (The old UBB flat files doubled that). Take that figure and check some of the Web host compaies like Verio: once you get above 100-200MB, you're into commercial rates.
Bandwidth
Last I checked (November), TFL was serving up
1.5 gigabytes of information every day! That's a
lot of bandwidth...I've been told it's more than General Motors! I'm not sure if that's true but I'd love to compare us to Brownells, for instance. As I write, there are 90 distinct Members and 66 guests accessing TFL files. Their average time on the site is far greater than most commercial sites. Take that bandwidth number and shop around on the internet. I'd be interested if you find any real bargains.
Talk to Erick from Glocktalk about this...he's had to switch web host companies as often as his underwear, due to the success of his site. We even colocated on a dedicated server with him for a while....they bounced us off for excvessive use.
Talk to Spark from BladeForums. We were on his dedicated server for about the first eight months...he had to throw us off just to keep his own site up.
As for the new server, a
Dell Poweredge 2450, we're purchasing this to avoid the storage fees talked about above. It also allows us to increase memory without saying "please". Finally, if you look at the specs, this is not exactly a PC. It comes with three separate hard drives and a system known as Raid5 for guaranteed disaster recovery.
Will it guarantee us a problem free future? I doubt it. But it will help us to continue to set the bar for others to follow.
Rich