Membership cost questionnaire

[BC867]

I voted for $30 -- about the cost of a Saturday night dinner out with my wife.

I'd pay that for participation each year. If we had assurances that there wouldn't be increases or hidden charges once we were committed.

 

[Linderbee]

See? The 50% trend is holding with almost 80 votes now (it's actually improved). I think we're doing good.

 

[Darth Llama]

I have to ask..

How does it possibly cost $500 a month to host a web forum? Especially one with banner ads? I don't get that.

 

[Chris_Sanders]

As an added bonus, for every $10 you spend you can send me a nasty, profanity laden PM and I won't ban you for you it

 

[Mike Olbinski]

I have to ask..

How does it possibly cost $500 a month to host a web forum? Especially one with banner ads? I don't get that.

Hmmm

It's the hosting fee...we get a TON of traffic, 45,000 pageviews a day...costs money to pay for a host.

 

[Lloydian]

Okay, looking at the averages, with 45,000 page views per day and looking at a long month of 31 days, that's about 1,395,000 million page views per month. If you assume that each page has a megabyte of data to transfer, that's 1400 GB of data transfer per month.

I, too, host a forum for Arizona folks (Arizona HDTV Forums at http://www.landlpcservices.com/phpBB2/index.php - always love new visitors), but I use godaddy.com for my hosting. Their premium hosting plan is $14.99 per month (less if you purchase longer periods in advance), and that plan allows 200 GB of storage and 2000 GB of data transfer per month. It allows 3 MS SQL databases and 50 MySQL databases. I use phpBB which uses a single MySQL database for all of the forums.

I'm not saying you should change to them, but in addition to looking for funding resources, consider asking your current host to take less money for their service.

All that said, I understand your plight, and frankly, even if it didn't cost you anything to provide this site, you're providing a valuable service. It seems that a more visible donation system and/or annual donation drives, even if they only represented profit, would not be unreasonable.

And to everyone else, while we're on the subject, I think I'll put my money where my mouth is. Follow me to the donation page, and how about donating what you think is fair today?

 

[former user 1]

Personally, I don't think there is anything wrong with asking for donations to keep this site going. Even though I am not a fan of Arizona sports, I do enjoy this site and would gladly pitch in $25 to keep it going.

I don't think that there should be a set donation price though. I think that any donations, whether it be $5 or $150 should be welcome. Maybe there could be a way that you get more perks for the more you donate? I'm not really sure how all of that works but just a thought.

 

[Shane]

Even though I am not a fan of Arizona sports,

 

[former user 1]

LOL! Well, I'm just being honest. I was invited here from another prominent poster. I liked what I saw ... the variation in forums, unique posters, and good chat so I joined.

 

[Gaddabout]

What if you limited non-members to 5 posts a day? 10 posts a day?

 

[BirdMan21]

I stopped reading about half way through so if someone else has thrown out this idea just ignore me.

Is there any way that you can lock someones ability to post until they have clicked on X number of links/week. Like say every Monday your count starts over and you have to click on 10 links before you can start posting. And if someone doesn't want to do that they can pay whatever $/year everyone decides on.

I would probably still pay $40 a year forthis site to have no ads, but understand you have to bring in the money some way.

I know it would suck to have to click on all the links, but if it takes me a couple minutes each week to bring in enough ad money to keep this place running that is easy for me.

 

[AZZenny]

The complaint was that the very existence of the ebay links is a pain in the ass. I think having to deal with them as you suggest would be unacceptable to a lot of people.

 

[SO91]

I don't post much here, but I'd be willing to pay the $50 in order to maintain the site. The adds don't bother me too much, but if they're not generating enough dough, than perhaps we can find alternative solutions. Someone mentioned haveing a telethon type event periodically, and while that sounds nice, maybe there's something people can get more excited about. I know a message board i used to visit for info had an online poker tournament for its members. I'm not entirely sure how it all was put together, but whoever wanted to participate would buy-in for, say $50, and the winner would get a portion of the revenue, and the rest i think was donated to a charity. I don't know how much interest people have around here for internet poker, but if it's relatively succesful and you could do it a few times a year, it might generate enough to keep the board going without actually charging people.

 

[Shane]

The complaint was that the very existence of the ebay links is a pain in the ass. I think having to deal with them as you suggest would be unacceptable to a lot of people.

Could you explain why they are a pain in the ass to you?

 

[Darth Llama]

Hmmm

It's the hosting fee...we get a TON of traffic, 45,000 pageviews a day...costs money to pay for a host.

Wow, and it's that much? I'm just surprised because I have a web forum for a game server I run, and it's $90 a year flat with 2 domains. Of course, it takes us over a week to get 45k hits. You might want to check out IX Web Hosting.

http://www.ixwebhosting.com/index.php/v2/pages.dspmain/PID/1560015?PID=1560015

They would probably do it a lot cheaper.

 

[TGarel]

Wow, and it's that much? I'm just surprised because I have a web forum for a game server I run, and it's $90 a year flat with 2 domains. Of course, it takes us over a week to get 45k hits. You might want to check out IX Web Hosting.

http://www.ixwebhosting.com/index.php/v2/pages.dspmain/PID/1560015?PID=1560015

They would probably do it a lot cheaper.

Indeed .. I have used IX for a few years now with Darth. I use it to host 3 music projects one Film Project (In the works) and a game forums.

IX guarantees you will never run out of bandwidth and does a breakdown tot hat effect their most expensive plan is 12.95/mo and has unlimited space/transfer, 3 free domains 16 dedicated IPs, ect... Seems almost too good to be true to me but as a customer for over 3 years now I can say they are all they advertise to be and more. The customer service was also top notch 24/7 live help.

What host company are you using and what features do you need? As 500/mo seems extortionist to me.

 

[Mike Olbinski]

Indeed .. I have used IX for a few years now with Darth. I use it to host 3 music projects one Film Project (In the works) and a game forums.

IX guarantees you will never run out of bandwidth and does a breakdown tot hat effect their most expensive plan is 12.95/mo and has unlimited space/transfer, 3 free domains 16 dedicated IPs, ect... Seems almost too good to be true to me but as a customer for over 3 years now I can say they are all they advertise to be and more. The customer service was also top notch 24/7 live help.

What host company are you using and what features do you need? As 500/mo seems extortionist to me.

We have our own dedicated server...Deru.net...

The server is pretty bad ass, but their prices are a bit high.

But we had a smaller machine before and when we get spike traffic on trades and big news, the server would just die.

 

[Mike Olbinski]

Actually, if anyone has suggestions in a different host, I'm open to it...

However, you need to realize that this isn't some site that can be hosted at $12 a month or $90 a year. We take a lot of resources up and we can at times have 200 people on the board trying to pull from a database.

So if you go out looking for a host, bear this in mind:

1. About a million pageviews a month
2. Roughly 3 gigs worth of data
3. Need ability to not crash the site when we have 200+ users on it.

Mike

 

[Lloydian]

1. About a million pageviews a month
2. Roughly 3 gigs worth of data
3. Need ability to not crash the site when we have 200+ users on it.

GoDaddy isn't tiny. For that matter, neither is ix. Either one will suit your needs (probably better than your current provider thanks to economies of scale). But again, it could be as simple as going to your current provider, telling them that they need to reduce their price to $15 a month, or you'll have to move. Surely they know you won't continue to pay an extra $485 a month out of pure charity.

But you can test it. Purchase a monthly plan from either of them, spend a couple of hours porting the system over to the new server (be sure to give us warning of when the site will be down as well as setting up redirection from the old server until the domain name change is propogated to the DNS servers), and run the system for a couple of weeks with the old location just waiting in the wings. When everything works out perfectly, make the change permanent, and if you don't like what you see (I highly doubt that), switch back.

 

[Lloydian]

Allow me one additional point. I'm sure Deru is a fine company with people interested in providing a quality product. But they're a small player in the online world, and while they may be a great choice for people with smaller needs, perhaps this site is simply an example of one that is not best suited for a smaller provider.

$25 a month for up to 20 GB of transfers? They're clearly not reaching out to larger customers.

 

[Mike Olbinski]

GoDaddy isn't tiny. For that matter, neither is ix. Either one will suit your needs (probably better than your current provider thanks to economies of scale). But again, it could be as simple as going to your current provider, telling them that they need to reduce their price to $15 a month, or you'll have to move. Surely they know you won't continue to pay an extra $485 a month out of pure charity.

But you can test it. Purchase a monthly plan from either of them, spend a couple of hours porting the system over to the new server (be sure to give us warning of when the site will be down as well as setting up redirection from the old server until the domain name change is propogated to the DNS servers), and run the system for a couple of weeks with the old location just waiting in the wings. When everything works out perfectly, make the change permanent, and if you don't like what you see (I highly doubt that), switch back.

Well, if you think this site could run on a $15 a month hosting plan, you don't get what it does.

We're on a DEDICATED server, where we're the ONLY site on it...many big sites are hosted like this...

Those $15 a month plans are SHARED plans where you are on a server with 100 other sites, or whatever.

Go look up dedicated servers, high end ones and see how much they cost a month.

At least $200.

 

[WayTooMuch]

Sounds like there wasn't enough research done when setting up these servers and I think you probably have some sort of ties to Deru to go with such a horrific hosting plan.

Godaddy offers this dedicated server for $319 a month, OR as low as $280 a month if you pay for 2 years of service(or you can go with Linux for $299 month if you pay month by month):

[FONT=arial, helvetica, sanserif]• Core 2 Duo 2.66GHz Processor
• 2x300 GB disk drive
• 2000 GB bandwidth
• 4 GB RAM
• Windows: 2003 Std Edition
• Plesk unlimited control panel
And these FREE features!
• SSL Certificate, a $29.99 value!
• $125 Google® AdWords® Credit*
• $200 Microsoft® adCenter Credit


[/FONT]

 

[Mike Olbinski]

This is ours I believe:

*2 @ 3.2Ghz Dual Core Xeon Processor/ 4G SDRAM/ 250G RAID 1 Disk Spac

 

[AZZenny]

The bottom line is that regular users of ASFN must not feel penalized, so you can't take away what they have now, or make it harder to use. You have to invite those who are willing to contribute, somehow making it 'worthwhile.' My guess is that for a very few perks -- no ads, better (exclusive) smileys, email, looser sig guidelines, maybe a special icon indicating 'sustaining member' under the avatar -- you'd get a fair number of people signing up at say $36/year -- 10 cents a day. My point is you are rewarding members rather than 'charging them' for relatively minor benefits. Just like museums do -- I belong to the Heard and Botanical gardens, and really, you don't get a whole lot of perks -- a private shopping day a few times a year ahead of public announcement, and a couple free guest admissions.

If someone with more time and energy than Chandler Mike currently possesses can run an online poker tournament where the winner splits the pot with ASFN, that'd be a great contribution, and waive the $36 fee for that person. If someone could arrange a members-only blog with a local sports figure, or a private Q and A once a month with some team personnel, likewise. Or arrange to auction off some piece of memorabilia.

 

[DeAnna]

I'd pay the $50 annually.

Maybe it could be a sliding scale...over 15K posts, it's $50 membership, 10-14K, $40, etc.