Site Costs

[Sabre]

Not sure where this goes, so I will put it here.

Simply put, I critisized a site/forum I used to like and still occationally post at because of it's agressive advertizment boardering on the intrusive, the constant pushing of it's shop and the sites increasing amount of payola (though they won't admit it outright, they aren't very secretive about it either) means I only hang around for the forums which are dying slowly.

A while ago they acted all indignant when I recommended NoScript as a means of blocking the adverts. They claim that that need all these means of profit because the site costs "$190 a month", the shop only generates about $18 a month and while they wouldn't give me a breakdown of costs and profits, they claimed that they were still working at a loss.

While I know in theory how to build a website, I also never put it into practice and was never taught how to get hosting, manage bandwidth, ect. As such I have no idea of the practical running costs of a site.

Given that SFO and KA hosts it's own media and has no adverts I've noticed, and has a more active forum, and a fewer staff, it got me thinking about how this place is run as well as the philosaphy of the staff who run it that means we don't have to put up with a mountain of crap.

[Matrilwood]

Try $10 a month to pay a proper web host, AND have your own domain name. The extra $180 comes from the equipment they have, depending on what kind of domain they are running it could be anything from dedicated servers to specialized computer equipment.

Forums are VERY cheap, all you need is to pay the web host and you're right, unless the idea of the forum is to make  a profit, you could pay for it out of you're own pocket.

[fox1235]

Try $10 a month to pay a proper web host, AND have your own domain name. The extra $180 comes from the equipment they have, depending on what kind of domain they are running it could be anything from dedicated servers to specialized computer equipment.

Forums are VERY cheap, all you need is to pay the web host and you're right, unless the idea of the forum is to make  a profit, you could pay for it out of you're own pocket.

zetaboards is free, you can make a site on there.

But you will have zetaboards in your domain.

[DZComposer]

We pay around $15/mo when averaged out. Another $30/mo for the TF2 server. Though, we are at the limit if what that buys us. VPS starts at about $40/mo and goes up from there. $200 is not an unreasonable number, that is unless the site is small like us (SFO is small in the grand scheme of the internet).

Some high-traffic sites can even surpass $1000/mo. Major commerce sites probably much more than that, because now you've got clustering and redundant sites (as-in where the datacenter is) involved. You're talking hundreds of thousands in hardware alone at that point (this is why the /b/tards couldn't take down Amazon with LOIC).