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| Voltage Forum > forum news > donations requested - expansion coming |
| Posted by: KT Roughneck Apr 19 2006, 02:02 AM |
| We have a lot in the works here at the Voltage Forum!We recently tried some new types of ads and revenue builders. They caused the site to run a lot slower and were generally not well received. We have removed them at your request. We try to do all we can to insure that your forum experience is the best that it can be.As a result, we are back to relying upon your generous donations to cover our hosting costs.We currently have a $400+ hosting bill at our main data center in Toronto (our nightly backups contain over 650MB of compressed data), and another $300 we need to cover for the backup servers in Wisconsin, so PLEASE do what you can to help. We have been shouldering much of this financial burden since the site went online, but we would SURE appreciate some help with the load. Especially right now.So if you have gotten good value from this forum, do what you can to support it. We have added a donate button to the forum header to make it easy. We have also added more donation options.Click here to visit our donation page:http://visforvoltage.com/donate.html(donations made via paypal are received instantly and are greatly appreciated)or send me an email at:admin [at] visforvoltage.com to request our snail mail address. Checks sent to our snail mail address are also greatly appreciated, though we prefer you use the paypal method to donate if possible.We are working on a major expansion of our offerings and you will be seeing the fruits of those labors soon in the form of a new podcast, a blog, and a graphic PSP magazine all with full RSS support! We are also improving navigation and centralizing our site on the forum.Thanks for your assistance, and please do what you can to express your support for our efforts. |
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I was always astonished about the cost Ken quoted for the hosting of the VV.com site. Since there wasn't any income stream to support the site, it was clear that site couldn't be a very sustainable business operation, and that eventually it would run out of resources and die. So it shouldn't be a surprise that's what eventually happened.
It's worth writting a little about the funding and operation of this site ...
First, despite the similarity in domain names, this site is run and funded independantly of VV.com. It is housed on a server which I'm renting for my own business purposes, and the domains are held by myself (I hold VV.org) and George (and I think ChasS) owns VV.net and a couple related domains.
The cost for the current server is about $95/month .. I have several sites hosted on this server, and the server cost is more than covered by income from those other sites. However the site does take a significant portion of the performance capability of the server and I am regularly considering whether to move to a more powerful server, secondly the disk space used by this site is pretty significant, mostly due to the files y'all are uploading to the site.
You'll notice a small advertisement on the site .. the money from that does go to me, and is on the order of $2-$5/month, and I consider that as paying for the portion of the server being used by this site.
There is a significant amount of human time spent to support the site. This includes the moderator team, the leadership team, and myself as the webmaster. It takes significant time to monitor the postings, help people learn the ropes of using the site, diagnose and resolve problems with the site, discuss the direction of this site, etc. None of us doing this work are getting any income for that work, it's all volunteer. For myself I'm highly motivated towards supporting society change especially around increasing awareness of EV's, and I'm happy with the success we've had with this site with the quality of the discussion happening here, and the growing number of users.
The software on the site is the Drupal content management system. It's an open source software package that's very well thought of, very popular, very powerful, and is used to power thousands upon thousands of sites around the Internet. The Drupal community is very active in supporting the software, adding new features, fixing bugs, etc. I'm using Drupal for most of my web sites and am very happy with it. The important thing for the continuation of this site is that I'm tracking the progress of the Drupal community in fixing bugs etc, and am always updating the software. I'm doing this for my other sites as well as this site, and am using exactly the same software configuration on all my sites.
By comparison ... there's hundreds of forum-oriented websites around the Internet, many of which run advertising .. no doubt the owners of those forums want to operate the forum as a business and perhaps make their living from running the forum. They always have a lot of advertising. There's a tradeoff between volunteerism as in the way we're running this site, and making a commercial operation out of a site.
- David Herron, http://davidherron.com/
- David Herron, The Long Tail Pipe, davidherron.com, 7gen.com, What is Reiki