BTW, my business is High Tech Consulting. Soup-to-nuts (desktop to enterprise support).
:Snap: :rolleyes:
Well Winston you sound like an old man. Good on ya’, they still call me ‘young buck’ at work :). My most recent technical advent was designing a new infrastructure that would consolidate our three internet web sites, three intranets spanning over three networks (i joined them at one box), our SIPR (secret) intranet and our three SIPR web sites(the secret military ‘internet’). I brought it down to three servers (the least regulations would permit) and popped PostNuke on each of them utilizing the ‘multi-sites’ feature. Now command representatives (ie moderators) manage their own content, and on our two windows boxes batch scripts take care of the cleanup. On the Linux box I use shell scripts. I am not a programmer (i’m learning C++ in college, maybe someday) but I learned enough to make it work off of the Google links I posted above. Practical, real-world experience, and we have 500 in-house workers that give this thing a workout, 24-7. The Navy doesn’t sleep. If someone gave me $100,000 dollars to host this board for five years, I’d set it up and go by myself a boat.
Just the facts, ma’am.
Heh. Yes, I’m an old man - 34.
You’ve still got it wrong, though. They’d pay me the 100k, I’d pay one of my guys 15k, and piss the rest away on penny whistles and moon pies. Then the client would realize “Hey, this doesn’t work any better than it did before”, and they’d sic their lawyers one me. But the IRS would have already gotten to me, so the client would be SOL. 
alterego, you do realize, do you not, that somebody has to actually write those batch files and shell scripts? But even once they’re written, your job still isn’t done, since there’s always something new popping up. We’ve had at least two security breeches since we’ve started, for instance. Clearly, our automated systems weren’t adequate to repair these, since they weren’t adequate to prevent them in the first place. We may (for all I know) have had other breeches, which were stopped by the techs before they got serious enough to notice. We’ve used two different brands of software, and many different versions of each, and each one required human intervention to install. Sure, the techs could have written a shell script to do the install, but it would have had to be a different shell script each time. New bugs are continually being discovered in the software, and they all have to be fixed. New features (some of them custom-made by our own techs) are implemented, turned off, or used for the first time. If you can write a program capable of dealing with all of these issues, and all of the other unanticipated issues which have not yet come up, then you’re wasting your time trying to manage a message board, because there’s plenty of money out there for a human-strong AI.
I realize manpower is costly and the reader is pushing a newspaper, and that they have two T1 lines and have significantly upgraded the hardware and no matter what they have done they just can’t seem to supply the demand. There are still definitely performance problems so maybe crunching the numbers on a few hosting sites would be worth it? I don’t know.
I guess all that I can say is that this place has started to generate some ‘substantial’ revenue according to at least Ed’s terms (isn’t he delusional?). kicks up feet and waits for fireworks. 
You don’t explain how DOS batch files, shell programs, or even external web hosting will reduce Ed’s time spent on the board.
Will your bat files make decisions regarding moderation problems? Your shell programs will research new software upgrades and decide when to install them, make the schedules, assign the manpower, order the software, open the packages, and put in the disks?
Even assuming you completely eliminate all tech support (and those are some mighty fine bat files) we’re still left with Ed’s time, and possibly others on the Reader’s payroll involved with moderation decisions, supervision, editorial decisions, legal issues, etc.
Although it’s only fair these folks work for free, or pretend their time is spent on something else when they are spending time on message board related matters, right?
One last time: 10 hours a week spent by people who cost you $30 per hour costs you about $15,000 a year.
Is it your contention that Ed’s time is free, and no other Reader employee will spend any time on message board related matters if the board is hosted in house? If not, how does anything you’ve said address these costs, which can easily approach the figures you claim are ridiculously high?