Whats it cost?
 

What does it cost to run a "big board" in a ideal world people who run "small boards" (like me!) will make it into "big board" land.

Currently my only cost is vb license, and shared hosting costs (£88 for the license and i think its £30 for the yearly charge so i can get the updates, and £9 a month)

Obviously license costs will remain the same, but have you had to spend any more on other software?

As to hosting, I just know costs will spiral as the board gets busier, how much am i looking at having to find a month as things grow?

Hi Jon!

I'm currently running a small board as well, but we're bandwidth intensive. Right now I'm eating a good 100gb a month (and that's with sharing loads with other affiliates :D) and we're an extremely young podcast (5 episodes). Anyhow, we'll be transitioning to a dedicated server this summer and that is where your best bet lies.

As boards grow so will your demands. Eventually, a shared hosting plan won't provide enought. You'll need to make the move to a dedi.

Currently I use Surpass Hosting and they're doing a dang good job. When I make the "big move" it will be to one of their managed dedicated servers.

At a good deal too. Expect a good $100ish dollards for a lowish-end dedicated :D. Obviously that price rises with what exactly you get.

My website has over 50,000 registered members, 2 million posts, and we average 186gb of bandwidth a month. I pay $209 hosting fees through www.servermatrix.com (bleh server) and $60 to my server manager to keep me secure and updated.

Currently Active Users: 381
Threads: 200,101, Posts: 3,275,705, Members: 33,314

$569US/m for 2 servers. one for web and email, other for db.

additional costs .. maybe costs involved in

1. buying license for app beyond compare for comparing changes to hacked files/templates to vB forum updates
2. license costs for secureCRT, secureFTP from vandyke.com for ssh telnet, secure ftp transfer
3. other admin software tools/apps you might need to make admin duties easier

etc etc

those kinds of things i needed to fork out for along with domain renewal costs, server upgrade/moving costs i.e. new setup fees etc

Basically m costs for my larger forums like sprintusers.com, zeldauniverse.net, or smashboards.com come down to hosting and promotional items I use for contests and giveaways. My two largest forums on 2 servers a piece, which costs aroun $600 a month at The Planet.

....bribes for eva2000 to get the perfect Server configuration.

I will chip in on this bribe deal...:D

ah forgot compulsory fees like that :D

Let's not forget to mention that as your userbase builds so does your ad revenue options. With some well placed ads there is really no reason that your community will make you money rather than cost you money.

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. :)

so it looks like colo is the way to go, so long as its local?

We use the colo store.

Well, like anything, there are advantages and disadvantages to both. But colo is ultimately more cost efficient and does what we need. And, since we own the server, its easy to move it (the physical server) to a new host if the need arises. So, if you're looking to go dedicated and don't want to spend money to have it managed, then colo is a good choice. As to the local comment, I'm not sure what you mean, as things like reboots are handled by the company you colocate with.

Out of curiosity, why are you pruning??

I wonder how much RAM and other things I can buy with the $500.00 a month we will save going COLO. Not to mention the servers we are getting are considerably more powerful than anything offered in most leased dedicated server outfits. If you compare what it would cost to lease the equipment we need we would probably save $1k a month.

A lot of people don't start out with the money to purchase them (used to be us) but when you can swing it... You will save a lot of money and have better equipment. Heck, you can get nice servers relatively cheap now days. Check out www.apaqdigital.com . They are custom building what we need for a really great price.

The average COLO rate I see is about $99/mo for 1u-2u or min-tower. Where we run into problems is the 1/2 megabit setup they offer that utilizes an average system for bandwidth. We burst sometimes up to 5 megs out during peak and then barely trickle at late hours, but none of colo's using this could tell me that I won't be billed for more because I averaged more than their 512 for a sustained period. I really would like to have my servers locally but I think I'm going to send them to dedicatednow since I can get 2000 gigs a month and it does not matter if I have certain periods that are really high.

I'm guessing you are talking about 95th percentile billing. The easiest way to see what you would fall into is install something like MRTG or Cacti. Graph your local interfaces and see what your average comes out to be under 95th billing. To do this on MRTG you will have to patch it.
http://www.seanadams.com/95/

Thanks for the info, Prohacker. Yup.. The good ole percentile billing. Will get that added and see where I am.

Approx. 800 €/month.
Obviously co-location would be cheaper, but to buy the hardware would have costed around 10.000 €, we would have to deal with defective hardware our selves, have to keep system software secure, etc.
As it is now, the machines are managed and so we don't have to worry about that.