I just wanted to ask, if I'm allowed or whatnot, why it costs $183 to maintain the forum servers every month. This is just me being curious, is that expensive or cheap compared to other servers and such?
I google-fu'd this but apparently it depends on how much traffic the server gets. And that's the extent of my "minute knowledge" on that topic.
I don't mind talking about it, I would like to be transparent about this sort of thing. We lease a LiquidWeb Storm Server with CentOS. Our $183/month cost includes $20 a month is for our CentOS license and for management/support from our hosting provider, $4 is for dedicated IP address (the domain, and dedicated IPs for each nameserver), and the remainder for using the actual hardware. The hardware includes a Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1271 v3 @ 3.60GHz', 3800MHz, 4 Core, Sockets: 1. Previously, our hosting costs were a little cheaper, around $130-$140/month, but we were overpaying for old disk drives and not SSD storage. When we upgraded we got the cheapest SSD package at the current costs. SSDs are important for a number of reasons, but most importantly because they make the site faster. Our server is a cloud dedicated server, which means it's ours only, but can also draw cloud resources - other people's websites aren't hosted on the same server. This is important for a lot of reasons, including the fact we don't share IP addresses, server resources, blacklisting, but also because we have the flexibility to make changes to the server software. When we upgraded to a dedicated server the first time it was because traffic to our site and sharing server resources impacted both site speed and uptime. I'm unsure how the forum would fair on Shared Hosting of a Virtually Dedicated Server today. Prices may have changed, but when we upgraded to our current cloud dedicated server the price difference between what we have and one step down was somewhere in the range of $35/month, and the benefits of our current set up seemed to make the most sense. I'm unsure if the market price or hardware value has changed since the last server upgrade, or what other hosting providers cost. It's also worth noting that while the site used to pay for itself via advertising income, the combination of the prevelance of ad blocking software and the large reduction in on-site advertisements has made that no longer the case. Presently we make less than $100 every two months through Google Adsense.
Even without adblock, which I currently don't have running for this site, I could imagine it wouldn't be enough anyways. Also I figured it costs money for a .org. and of course all that technical stuff you said which i'll just nod my head and say "OH yeah, of coarse" to. .
Everything below is an assumption based on my own experience managing servers. To expand on this, the server is housed in a large datacenter. He's paying to rent a location on the rack server rack. He's also got a contract for how much electricity he can use. People tend to underestimate how much it costs to run a server in terms of electricity. Data centers also don't sell you electricity at-cost. It's marked up for a number of reasons, the biggest being that they supplement the power supply with their own backups, another being that servers produce a ton of heat and they room they're stored in has to be air conditioned to about 60 degrees.
