GatewayRedbirds.com

planet planet wrote: ↑

February 10 20, 7:57 pm

Loved the board for years, love the current mods, and couldn't imagine life without GRB, despite life getting in the way from regularly posting. Commence with the Venmo info! Maybe we could do a quarterly Venmo drive? Thank you Michael, Kyle, and now Theo and the Jets!

We should do it as often as necessary.

If the people who selflessly provide us this fantastic forum ever for one second think "why am I doing this on my dime?", it is one second too many.

Let us help pay for what we are getting so much out of. I hate feeling like a leech.

count me for a few bones as well.

While we are at it, I can't think of a good reason that I shouldn't get paid for my insightful posts.

Thanks.

If I have to start paying just to get insulted and bullied and called stupid, I will do it the old fashioned way - keep giving my paycheck to my wife.

heyzeus wrote: ↑

February 4 20, 10:18 am

2. Hosting the site costs about $110/month. We're going to explore some different options that would bring new features to GRB, but I don't think the costs will change significantly unless we were to allow ads. To be clear, we're not going to do that if it means a disruption of the experience we all want here. The mods aren't going to make major changes without running things by y'all first, don't worry.

I mean, can you not shop around for cheaper hosting? That price sounds absolutely insane. Admittedly, it's been a few years since I last adminned a forum like this, but my hosting fees were like $100 a year.

Famous Mortimer wrote: ↑

March 4 20, 10:14 am

heyzeus wrote: ↑

February 4 20, 10:18 am

2. Hosting the site costs about $110/month. We're going to explore some different options that would bring new features to GRB, but I don't think the costs will change significantly unless we were to allow ads. To be clear, we're not going to do that if it means a disruption of the experience we all want here. The mods aren't going to make major changes without running things by y'all first, don't worry.

I mean, can you not shop around for cheaper hosting? That price sounds absolutely insane. Admittedly, it's been a few years since I last adminned a forum like this, but my hosting fees were like $100 a year.

You're right, it's not cheap. My personal hosting is $120 every two years. I know GRB was on a lower host at one time, but kept crashing and having db connection issues so Michael switched it to a private server instead of a shared server.

There is a hosting server that costs about $70 a month we could downgrade to. It has just enough RAM/CPU to hold GRB, and it's storage would require us to pare the site down a bit. The problem is we're grandfathered into a nicer server right now, so if we downgrade and then realize it wasn't big enough and re-upgrade we would lose some of the resources we have right now.

Ideally a site like GRB needs cloud based hosting, because we only use the max of our server maybe 5% of the year during gameday threads or playoff time, etc. But cloud base hosting is a pretty high floor. So for how small GRB is relative to big businesses, i''d expect moving to AWS or something similar to cost roughly $200 a month just because we'd need an EC2, a SQL database, backups for all of that, and then the time to set up IAM and permissions, export our db and migrate it over there, etc.

If GRB were an order of magnitude bigger then a cloud based hosting solution would make sense, if we were about half the size we are now then we could save a lot on hosting. But GRB is in that weird spot where we generate enough traffic that a shared hosting service doesn't make sense, but we don't generate enough traffic for variable hosting to save us money.

Fair enough.

Perhaps, to save space, you could kill the megathreads. Other forums I go on limit threads to 100 pages - anything that hits that size gets archived and a new thread started (there's a ton of threads in Social-General that are over 400 pages, and have been going for years). I'm not entirely sure how this works, but I'm more a big picture guy than nuts-and-bolts.