What does it actually cost to keep the SDMB up and running? The mods aren’t paid, so it would be mostly server space and software, I assume. How much is that per year?
It’s a reasonable question to ask, but I don’t believe that it’s information that’s been made public, at least not in recent years. I’m sure that Ed knows (and TubaDiva almost undoubtedly did know, too), but I don’t know how much of that information is even shared with the moderators, much less us garden-variety Dopers.
Scroll down to July 11; this is an interview with the director of an community radio station in Petersburg, Alaska, a town of 3,000 in the panhandle, that might lose their only all-purpose station if funding is cut too much. (The only other station in town broadcasts canned Lutheran programming, except for the local church services which are broadcasted live.)
Yeah, unless SDMB is run on it’s own server, I am unsure how much “cost” there really is. I am sure it’s non-zero, but if our Board is living on infrastructure set-up for some other purpose and we are just riding along, I wonder if there is more cost in removing it as opposed to just leaving it. How about software, security, licenses, admin and such? - I imagine that is probably a more clear line item on some balance sheet.
My guess is $50-250/month, including the 50% non-profit discount. The site is hosted by Discourse, not run on CPM’s own server (or their cloud).
[linux:~]$ host boards.straightdope.com
boards.straightdope.com is an alias for straightdope.hosted-by-discourse.com.
straightdope.hosted-by-discourse.com has address 184.105.99.106
straightdope.hosted-by-discourse.com has IPv6 address 2602:fd3f:3:ff03::6a
That is not much money at all. If it had to go private and lost the non-profit discount, it would hopefully be in the range of $500/month. That is probably more than could be paid for by just turning on ads, and would require some sort of member payment.
Self hosting a discourse instance is really easy, so assuming volunteer system administration, the price would drop to the cost of hosting, possibly as low as $50/month.
All of that completely depends on the willingness of CPM to license the appropriate trademarks and copyrights, as well as putting the actual content into some other group’s hands.
In summary, the technical part is easy, the financial part is medium, and the intellectual property part is hard.
What? I thought it was just that the paperwork was slow.
They haven’t even reimbursed you for the jackboots, eh?