3 replies to this topic

[Live4Jesus]

I hope I'm not overstepping my bounds here by asking a nosy question. On the old site, they said it would cost $1500 a month for the right kind of storage / bandwidth and server "power". That was one of the excuses for letting the old site go away.

I just wondered if it really costs that much to run a site like this? I guess it might this is a huge site.

[Josh Bond]

I hope I'm not overstepping my bounds here by asking a nosy question. On the old site, they said it would cost $1500 a month for the right kind of storage / bandwidth and server "power". That was one of the excuses for letting the old site go away.

I just wondered if it really costs that much to run a site like this? I guess it might this is a huge site.

You know what they say about etiquette: never ask a lady how much she weighs, don't talk politics in social settings, don't ask what something costs...

But etiquette aside, it doesn't cost anywhere near $1,500 a month, thankfully. We have a dedicated server which costs $175 a month, paid quarterly (cheaper to pay quarterly). We get 20 terabytes a month of bandwidth (fyi: 1,000 megabytes in a gigabyte; 1,000 gigabytes in a terabyte) and our own server.

It could be run cheaper, no question. But shared hosting or VPS hosting (which is still shared, just less shared) won't work long term on a community that tracks data and provides user interaction like IPBoard does. It requires raw processing power. And on shared configurations, you have to worry about what your neighbors are doing on their websites (crashing apache web server, causing ripple effects on to your side); slow response time to the website; host complaints that you're consuming too many resources as your community grows, etc. My friend who runs PrayerRequest.com just moved from a VPS for exactly this reason.

Our Server specs:

Intel Quad Core XEON Quad Core 3430 2.40GHz 8M Cache
8 GB DDR3 1333Mhz RAM (memory)
1 Gbps Public (the "size of the bandwidth pipe"--lots of bandwidth is useless if you can only serve 1 or 2 simultaneous downloads at full speed).
20 TB Public bandwidth (bandwidth)
1.0TB SATAII - 7,200RPM (hard drive)

[pfpeller]

If you factored in the value of your time, the cost would be significantly higher. Thanks for the great site for us to download and share modules. You have made this very easy...

[journey]

I second the thanks for this site and say AMEN! This is a ministry for the Body of Christ and God is definitely using it for His Glory. This ministry will be in my prayers and I'll be happy to help financially with whatever I can afford.