Uh, on my board (almost a year running now with 15k members (weekly pruned), 200k posts, roughly 50k hits per day) we're luckely being sponsored, it's not too big though, that's a fact. Using about 70gigs a month of the bandwidth, the rent for the dedicated server costs about 69€ a month. Right now we haven't got ad's so theres no income, the host has a fulltime job though.

our server is a damn good deal at about $50 a month. it handles our users with plenty of ease(forgot the specs). we go through 1-300GB a month.

i have the problem now of possibly needing to upgrade the server and that would mean i am up in the 100+ range a month. but with that i found a host that will give me 4TB of transfer a month(video hosting, possibly e-mail hosting) all that fun stuff would help to generate some extra revenue. but i dont know if it would be enough to get 100ish a month. my site is pretty much payed only by sponsors with some user donations here and there.

We pay $800/month to two dual opterons at a very nice D.C. This server expense will increase i am thinking about another load balancing option in the near future.
Plus the seo hacks: We paid like $500.
Admin for the server : $100 a month
Ads expense: Thinking about $750/day ads and other ads $200/month

Income Adsense and 3rd party advertisers , definetly not covering the costs. Love my community so money is not a problem.

Dedicated servers = waste of money.

After you buy your own servers (and co-locate), the bandwidth and server space prices aren't expensive at all. In fact, the more bandwidth you use, the cheaper it gets.

who has the $$ upfront to fork out for that option? Then what happens when a drive dies? memory goes bad? You have to buy it ship it to them and get them to install for a fee.

colo=waste of money

If you are a successful site, you should have a good, steady advertising revenue to work with. If a drive dies, your co-locator will charge you a per hour to replace a hard drive. Our co-locator even has hardware available for emergencies.

colo=saving lots of money in the long run

You will also be able to have more powerful hardware for your server. MOST dedicated server providers use the typical "Dual 2.8 GHz Xeon" setup.

Do you own a home?
Do you own a car?

It all depends on what is right for you. :)

You have the cash to pay $750 a day on advertising? Egad! Good for you, but, dang...

Keyword is after. There are a number of times when I think colocation is a good deal (ie, when you want a really really nice server, or lots of bandwidth) you can't generalize that to mean all dedicated servers are bad deals. They're tools and both have different advantages and disadvantages... use one when it's more appropriate over the alternative.

That's what we do. Colo fees are $50 a month right now, so it seems to be a better solution until we upgrade our server next year.

I pay about 300 a month for 1/3 cage and 1/2 a megabit. I run other stuff besides my forum - but my forum is paying its share of the hosting fee - I make about 150 a month off adsense right now. I have to colocate cause I am the type of person who has to own and maintin thier own stuff.. so its a great deal for me.

Where are all these cheap colos you guys are using? I've never seen anything less than $500/month, but I've never looked that hard, either. :)