NationStates Jolt Archive

I dunno if it's appropriate, but I feel compelled to ask:

I was a member of a community who had an owner that just decided to come back. He claims the server costs (Everything, basically) for that site are up in 3500$ per month.

I and many of my fellow community friends find this outrageous and utterly impossible.

However, I can't find any proof that it's outrageous. The site has maybe 30+ active members, but they are heavily active and post a lot - on average 274 posts per month in the past year. Or they were anyway, before he overhauled the site.

I dunno if I am permitted to link to the site, but it contains a very large archive.

So, on the basis that it gets roughly 200 visitors per day, where between 30-90 are members (not all unique though) and that 274 new posts are made per month and there is an archive containing close to a million posts (most of which are not read)...

...is it even possible to get server costs that high?

Atma's first forum had at leats twice as many monthly posts and cost $10/month or something.

274 posts per month? That's barely active. My car forum gets about that in a single day.

It's possible, if the guy bought a T3 line and only uses it to run that site, but that would be incredibly dumb. That price is not at all reasonable for what you're doing.

The kind of usage and storage you are talking about can be had for free (with ads) from numerous forum hosting sites. Many of the NS forums have this level of traffic and are hosted at Invision (invisionfree.com (http://invisionfree.com)).

If you really need to host it yourself then an SDSL line only costs £100 ($200) a month. I don't know if SDSL is available in the US, but I'm sure something similar will be.

274 posts per month? That's barely active. My car forum gets about that in a single day.

some posters in NSG get that in a single day.

some posters in NSG get that in a single day. Yeah. That's nuts! :eek:

Yeah. That's nuts! :eek:

I'm far from sure, but when a spam thread is very active it could be possible to have happened at least once.

My highest is about 125 a day.

My website stats:

Number of posts: 500611 Posts per day: 264.90
Number of topics: 22584 Topics per day: 11.95
Number of users: 21255 Users per day: 11.25
Board started: Tue Jul 16, 2002 6:17 pm Avatar directory size: 21.86 MB
Database size: 1324.24 MB Gzip compression: OFF


My costs: $49/month

If those are his costs, he's very stupid.

So what's he trying to do? Get you to pay the costs?

I dunno if it's appropriate, but I feel compelled to ask:

I was a member of a community who had an owner that just decided to come back. He claims the server costs (Everything, basically) for that site are up in 3500$ per month.

I and many of my fellow community friends find this outrageous and utterly impossible.

However, I can't find any proof that it's outrageous. The site has maybe 30+ active members, but they are heavily active and post a lot - on average 274 posts per month in the past year. Or they were anyway, before he overhauled the site.

I dunno if I am permitted to link to the site, but it contains a very large archive.

So, on the basis that it gets roughly 200 visitors per day, where between 30-90 are members (not all unique though) and that 274 new posts are made per month and there is an archive containing close to a million posts (most of which are not read)...

...is it even possible to get server costs that high?

He is fucking lying threw his teeth

I host an online game with over 1400 active members and over 100,000 accounts (and it is click based) plus a forums ... you know how much it costs with all the features

About 50 a month ... the hosting you are describing needed is about 6 dollars a month maybe as high as 20 depending on file storage and such

Note: Our posts are usually quite long. I estimated an average based on that we got 100k posts over a year. Each post is usually between a page or two.

So what's he trying to do? Get you to pay the costs?

Basically, yes, by introducing ads to non-paying people.

That's ridiculous though, because many of us started paying a few years ago so we wouldn't need ads for anyone.

He is fucking lying threw his teeth

I host an online game with over 1400 active members and over 100,000 accounts (and it is click based) plus a forums ... you know how much it costs with all the features

About 50 a month ... the hosting you are describing needed is about 6 dollars a month maybe as high as 20 depending on file storage and such

Yeah, we're kinda getting to the point where we really don't trust him.

Since he came back, he started enforcing the conduct rules causing the exact opposite reaction, as in, everybody started swearing a lot more (simply because we had figured out why people were swearing and he hadn't been around when we changed our conduct to avoid the blatant swearing). He even started banning people for saying wtf >.<

He claims to have received licensing from a few games, but I've contacted two of them and one of them has already told me that they have no record of this. I wouldn't be surprised if he's lying about pretty much everything else too. For example, he claimed to have paid some 200$ in taxes to Delaware. One of our members live there, but...

...he went to check and no taxes have been paid yet >.<

But yeah, just wanted to be sure I had more than just word of mouth to rely on the costs not possibly being close to 3500$. He's either getting ripped off, lying through his teeth or trying to earn money off the forum.

And quite frankly, a lot of us are so tired we're already working on our own :p

Umm it seems a bit pricey to me, but what are we talking about?

How profesional a setup are we talking here?

Does he own the server? Is it in a cold room, what speed line has he got in, and how much does he pay for that? Does he keep updateing hardware, HDD, etc...

What about the interface, did he design it, does he pay members of staff? Is it his earning bussiness, how many staff does he have, what's his wage, what about all the bills, rent?

here's (http://www.fasthosts.co.uk/dedicatedservers/) who we host with. you can rent a server from them (with a dedicated T1 virtual pipe) for £60 per month... that's $120

we don't hire a server but use shared hosting instead. if this guy is running one site he really shouldn't be leasing his own server... and even then, the price does seem ridiculous. if he's hosting multiple sites it makes more sense, but why should you guys have to foot the bill? and if its his own server, that seems unnecessary, at least on the info you've given.


google webmaster world forums - they're pretty good and helpful there as well.