How Much Does It Cost To Run SDMB?

About This Message Board
1

Mods, if you feel this post would be better in About This Message Board, feel free to move it. I figured since I’m looking for a definite answer to a factual question, I’d put it here.

On an alternative site, I’ve found a list of their expenses.

I don’t know much about these programs etc., and what is needed to keep a message board like SDMB up, but I’m thinking …
How was SDMB paying for it before?
What is so expensive?

So my biggest question is:

Wasn’t the reason we had a slow server because it was free? We understood and tried to be patient. But now, SDMB will be getting quite a bit of money. Let’s say half of us stay, 3500. That’s $17500 in their pockets this week.
Why can’t they upgrade the server now?

Help me understand the expenses. Thanks.

2

I certainly hope your not looking for a factual answer because and I’m quoting Ed Zotti here this is from your user agreement…

I have been asking about the accuracy of GQ questions and what effect having to pay to get “The Straight Dope” will have on these boards and no one seems to want to answer my questions. So if you don’t mind a slight hijack, What is it going to cost for us to get “The Straight Dope”?

3

All questions about this message board go in ATMB, even factual ones.

I don’t feel myself at liberty to discuss how much it costs to run the SDMB. Besides, I forget the actual dollar amount, though I do remember picking my chin up off the floor after I heard it. I seem to recall that bandwidth is far and away the biggest expense. You can’t compare the bandwidth costs of Any Old Message Board, Inc., with the SDMB. I suspect we’re many times busier than they are. There is no way that half of all registered users will pay. More than half of all registered users are one-post Charlies. They register, post once (or not at all) and fade away into the void of cyberspace never to be heard from again.

bibliophage
moderator GQ

4

UnaBoard costs a small amount - $25 a month, plus occasional capital expenses (domain name, etc.). We have 1/10 the traffic of the SDMB, but are growing towards 1/8, so maybe you could scale it from there. However, I could have the same bandwidth as the SDMB for an extra $100 a month. And thanks to a large amount of unsolicited donations, we are getting a new server which (I think) is more powerful than the SDMB server. So at first blush, it seems cheap.

But then, you enter the coporate world, where things suddenly aren’t so cheap. Webservers at work which have less than half the power of UnaServer2 cost $10,000-$15,000 because they go for things like hot-swappable RAID, multi-CPUs (which really do nothing for a web server, but oh well), and even - and this is cool, I admit - hot-swappable power supplies. The only thing I have that is hot-swappable is bondage gear Fierra and I share (which was not paid for by donations, although there were many offers of free photography…) :wink:

Then you figure that internal IT support is at $30 an hour with a 1.5 to 2.0 multiplier. So a woman-day ends up being an internal “cost” of $320 to $480. Spend 3 days trying to get a stupid SCSI driver to work right, and there’s more than $1000.

Pay some person to do 1 day of maintenance each month, and you end up with $4000+ a year in effective cost.

Now you may argue “but the person is on the Staff. Someone is paying for them anyhow. So there’s not really that cost, right?” Well, yes and no. Internal IT cost centers have to be tracked by businesses like any other expense, and what the Reader (presumably) sees each year in the pro forma is a line item for “SDMB support - $5000”.

So, while the Reader could do a very low-cost effort like I have in theory, in practice it’s hard to do. Some businesses pull it off, others are bound by intangible considerations, such as legal, security, confidentiality, or simply desire to have complete control of the server.

I mean, listen to all the people posting about how giving their CC number to the Reader will effectively result in it being skywritten over a Romanian uberhacker camp within 24 hours. Think your hosted server doesn’t get browsed on and looked at? I know people who own hosting services, and they snoop to their heart’s content.

5

Bandwidth and manpower (paying the techs) are probably the two biggest ongoing expenses. I used to work in the tech department of a public school district, and quite a bit of money went into those two areas. (Quite a bit went into the football program as well, but that’s another story.)

6

I think the OP was referring to “current users” as defined by Ed Zotti in the referenced thread…people who have posted in the last month who according to Ed currently number around 7,000.

I agree there is no way half of all registered users will pay, but a good fraction of the smaller number…who knows?

7

I am not sure what the monthly or annual costs are, and I will not try to speculate on that.

I will tell you this much that I DO know: we’ve been on our own here in cyberspace for something like 5 years now and in that time the Reader has spent in excess of $100,000 American on us.

That’s a lot of expenses, any way you look at it. Has the Reader recouped any of that 100K investment? Not really; with the exception of occasional little dribbles of ad revenue (not all of which has passed muster with our members, either, let me tell you), we have done nothing but cost them money.

They have literally let us have this time and space out of the goodness of their hearts. Pretty cool for a company, huh?

It’s way past time that we started hauling our own freight here. The Reader has looked on this as a fascinating experiment, but we cannot continue to trade on their good will.

Want this place to continue to exist in cyberspace? Put your money where your mouth is. Support us.

your humble TubaDiva
Administrator

8

[…applause…] Bravo! :slight_smile:

9

TubaDiva, could you put that post of yours on a sticky atop every forum here? I think it quite succinctly describes the real world situation vis-a-vis this board.

10

Honesty is the best policy. Thank you for your answer, TubaDiva. It certainly makes things more understandable.

11

:eek: :eek: :eek:

You’ll have the money tommorow

12

One of the benefits of this change will be getting these “one-post” Charlies off the rolls. I assume that those that use the 30 day trial and don’t join will not be counted. The 44,000+ member figure has always bothered me even when it was much lower, since it was obviously inflated in regards to active posters or even the lurkers who occassionally post.

13

I’m not a one post Charlie, but I am a “few post Charlie,” and I will be registering – with all due gratitude – ASAP. Keep up the good work. I appreciate your efforts and the (mostly) high level of the discourse on the boards. (I also appreciate the low humor.) :slight_smile:

14

Well, uh, gee.

That comes out to at least 20k per year. Even at an estimated 3,000 memberships at $4.95 per each, that comes to only $14.8 large. Still around 6 g`s short of the 20k.

Is this a problem?

Oh, and what`s the difference between a Member and a Charter Member?