Your response has been overwhelming. This surge of member support is going to not only take care of this month's bill, but also help me to make an investment in upgrading to a plan, either at our current host or a different host, where our monthly costs can be more controlled.
I've explained a little of this to a few members in private posts, and it might get a little boring, but for those who are interested:
We pay many, many times more for bandwidth at our current host than at a GoDaddy.com or similar, because our current host developed the software that runs our forums, and controls the software license. The host also provides a more stable server environment with far fewer temporary outages than a GoDaddy.com or similar (no offense to GoDaddy - I like them and have a couple of small sites hosted there).
I know that Bob moved us to our current host for good reason, because he didn't want our community to endure any more outages, plus he couldn't afford to spend so much time every month just dealing with technical/server problems at the hosting provider. Our current host takes care of all that ... we have only had 3 very brief outages that I know about in the past 2 years 8 months, and each time they have fixed the problem very quickly. And I am not willing to consider moving to any other host if that will mean we will lose our post history here, lose our member IDs, and basically have to start over.
So, I've looked into upgrading to other plans at our current host, or buying a license to the software and making a move, but every time I've considered doing that, it seemed too expensive. For any of those moves, I would have to pay the current month's bill, plus over $1,000 more in one-time costs for either the upgrade or software license and setup fees at a new host, plus spend a bunch of extra time making the move work, etc. But this month, with all of your help, I may actually be able to make a move like that.
I'll be talking with our current hosting company this week and also looking into the options for a move. One thing I can promise is that I won't make any move that causes us to lose the valuable info that's contained in these forums, or lose our member identities!
Oh, for those who asked, photos like those posted by GotWood do not eat up our bandwidth, as they are not hosted here. We do pay a very high rate for bandwidth ($5 per GB in excess of our plan allowance - this month the excess was 100GB = $500 just for bandwidth). But all that bandwidth is used up just by the normal activity of members and visitors clicking from page to page, doing searches, reading posts, responding, reading the non-forum pages, etc. And I certainly don't want any of that to stop!
I'll update you all later this week on progress toward moving to a plan, or host, that gets the costs under control for the future. I thank you all for your support, but honestly do not want to support the site by running an ongoing telethon, LOL!
Thank you,
Julie