Re: Wow
Your wanted to know how much. So if a server fails and needs replaced, how do they do it? Beg for a new server? Your wanting them to tell you how much it costs and what exactly they do.
Your Donation Will Be Used To Pay For our ever increasing bandwidth costs, our hosting Service, domain registration, software licensing fees, and maintenance costs
Like others have mentioned, it would be nice to know at least a rough amount of what's spent in a year. My hosting has unlimited disk space and unlimited transfer for $10 a month. Domains are $8 a year, cheaper if you buy it for multiple years. vBulletin Leased is $100 a year. If all the admins are donating their time, I'm not sure what's meant by maintenance costs, unless there's a colo server involved. That's under $250 a year (plus additional software licensing). My cousin is running
his forum (~1,100 users, 50ish active concurrently) on free SMF software on a $60/mo VPS which is a lot more than he actually needs. Even if you went that route, you're talking $720 for the hosting so it should be under $1,000 total for the year. If there is a colo server and costs are a lot higher than that, it may be worthwhile to look into a VPS. Then if something breaks you're not responsible for it (sort of like renting rather than owning your home). With the virtualization stuff becoming big lately, it should make it a lot more reliable too.
In no way am I against Keith trying to recoup his costs to keep this board running for the community. I've donated in the past, and will again. It's just that having a goal figure in there implies that it takes that much to keep things going, and those of us in this field know that's not the case. I think most people have no problem supporting the board, we just want to know where it's really going. I think that's why vettandtyphoon did donate - he feels this place provides some value to him. However, if you tried to tell me that you needed <Dr. Evil>one million dollars</Dr. Evil> to keep the place running, I'd probably say the exact same thing he did.
I bet there are people out there who would see the notice above and think that we need $4500 right now to keep SyTy.net alive, and would be generous enough to give $1,000 because it's that important to them. Is it really fair to take that much from one person, because they thought it was needed now just to keep it alive? If you put an inaccurate goal amount in there, I just see it as being a bit deceptive. I think it should be set as close as possible to the actual operating costs. If you're truly doing this just to cover your costs, then it shouldn't matter if donations completely stop once the goal is reached (though I'm guessing they wouldn't).
As for starting a new board, it would be hard to compete with SyTy.net. However, it's a completely different scenario if Keith decides that keeping SyTy.net up is too costly/difficult, and shuts it down completely or hands the domain off to someone else. As you guys have pointed out with the other boards, it's the content that makes this place, not the particular owner or board software. If this site were to go down, I honestly believe another would take its place. Assuming the people here were able to find the new board (i.e. a single replacement rather than a hundred random boards with three people each), I think the new site would be just as good as this one. It's not that I have anything against Keith or any of the other SyTy community, I just don't see anyone (including myself) as being irreplaceable. If something happens to one of us, the rest will find a way to fill that gap.
