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Folks, I have not done this before in the 2 years and 8 months that I've owned and run this site, but I just about fainted when I opened the monthly bill for the HS Baseball Web today and have decided to ask for a little help.

I have shared before that our monthly direct costs for hosting the site and forums has grown to over $500 per month, and I've been working diligently with some good sponsors and advertisers to keep covering the costs and break even on an annual basis. But we all must have had a little cabin fever in January, because our bandwidth and our bill suddenly shot way up. I received the monthly invoice today and it's $888.80!

Some other nice folks have posted in the past suggesting donations, and I've actually asked them not to do too much of that, because I'm trying to support the site with the advertising. But this bill has caught me a little off guard, and I guess I'm not too proud to ask for help. Please don't anyone feel obligated, and don't feel guilty if you're not in a position to help. But if you've been thinking about chipping in and just haven't gotten around to it, now might be a good time. Wink

Julie
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For those who don't know, we have a Donations page which I usually haven't wanted to advertise. There is a PayPal link at the bottom of the page, and you can use this link even if you don't have a PayPal account:
http://www.hsbaseballweb.com/donate.htm

Also, I am looking into options for reducing our future costs. I've thought about moving the site to a less expensive server, but there are some complications. Those of you who have been here for many years will remember that the website and forums had two major server crashes in the first 7 years or so. The less expensive hosting services just weren't prepared to handle our volume of visitors and members, plus our fairly complicated forum software. And of course our forums are busier now than they were in the days of the crashes!

Anyway, it wasn't easy for me to post this, but it's either ask for a little help, or plan on skipping a car payment or two this month, LOL!

Julie
I know in the past, Julie has told us that keeping PM's in our private system is a burden on the costs. Since that time, I've tried to make it a point to delete PM threads in my que that were no longer active.

The word invaluable, like many descriptors, gets bandied about quite a bit. However, in the truest sense of the word, HSBBW is invaluable. The resource(s) here are unavailable anywhere else that I know of. I know from talking to many that have come before me, that the value here is incalcuable.

As a coach, I tell my players at the end of the season, that they owe me. They owe me to pass on the knowledge and help to the next generation, that I passed on to them. In that same sense, I feel the obligation here and although my son is past his HS days, a deep responsibility to make sure that others are provided the same opportunity at enlightenment that I was.

Thanks Julie, and thanks to all you others that were here before me to make sure that this was here for me. I promise to do my part to make sure it's here for those that come after.
Last edited by CPLZ
Thank you all so much for your outpouring of support. It is very difficult for me to ask for help, and I have actually asked others in the past not to make announcements. I strongly prefer to support the site with appropriate advertising and the help of some very kind sponsors, but this month's bill was too much of a surprise.

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! Smile

Thank you,

Julie
Last edited by MN-Mom
Krak,

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm going to look into several hosting possibilities, but as I started researching a year ago, things were more complicated than I expected. The kind of personal or small-business hosting provided by a cheaper company can't support the data load of our forums.

Warning: The rest of this may only be of interest to computer geeks.

I'll be looking at something more robust like a dedicated server or shared-dedicated, business-class server. But that's only about 1/3 of the solution. The other two thirds are the forum software, and the database support for our huge number of accumulated posts.

I have to find a way to get our forum software loaded at a new host, and receive ongoing "backend" technical support/database maintenance to keep the forums from crashing. I do Web development professionally, but I do not have the expertise to do the database administration.

Low cost hosting solutions offer free forum capabilities, but those small scale operations only do a good job of handling the database load for searches, etc. up to maybe 10,000 to 100,000 posts. Above that number, searches take forever, and forums crash frequently (on the small scale host).

Bob tried two or three different inexpensive providers and the site crashed several times and was down for days at a time, when it probably only had under 100,000 posts. As of this month's bill we are up to 420,000 posts on the HS Baseball Web forums...and growing.

I did a test on GoDaddy.com a while back, and started a little forum and left it alone for a while, not paying attention to it. After a while, of course it filled up with SPAM posts. When I tried to do searches with total posts at about 20,000, the searches took minutes instead of seconds, and the forum crashed repeatedly. (No problem, it wasn't supposed to be a real forum, I was just testing.)

Part of what our current host does for us with almost a half-million posts, besides providing heavy duty servers etc. to store them, is that they maintain our databases behind the scenes. They balance the load and keep the database tables from becoming corrupted...and allow us to do searches of almost a half-million posts, in 10 seconds or less, without crashing. Large companies have Database Administrators on staff to keep databases working well. That's the area of service our host provides that explains the high rates.

And the biggest thing to me is that we have to keep using this forum software that is owned by our host. I don't want to lose any of our capabilities to send Private Messages, or for moderators to take care of various areas of our forums, or moderating posts, etc. etc. One possible solution I am looking at is negotiating with our current host to "cap" our costs with them, even as we continue to grow. I am hoping to work something out where I purchase the software license from them, but for a larger up-front investment, negotiate more reasonable monthly charges. I'll be working on that this week!

Julie
Last edited by MN-Mom
Julie,

I bet most users are glad to know they can pitch in and help to keep this little web-gem alive. Imagine folks what it would be like without the HSBBW. I remember the times when the old BB went down--there were many users with some serious withdrawal issues. Sooner or later, in one way or another, we all benefit from this site. Thanks for doing it Julie.
This site is invaluable. That's why I'm glad to contribute my $$. But....

I'm sure this idea has been shot down before but I'll throw it out there. Why not have a small membership fee? We could still keep the site free to view and search, but if you want to be a poster, it's $10 to join and you pay $10 each year to maintain your membership.

Or if you really want to start raking it in, charge TR per post. Maybe that will cut down on some of the bullc.r.a.p. Ok, take it easy TR, I'm just kidding. I'm as full of c.r.a.p as the next guy.

I've got my asbestos suit on so fire away.

P.S. Backup idea....if a thread hasn't made it to 'golden' status, after a couple years can't we just delete the old ones?
There are online fundraising programs such as igive.com and donationstreet.com that people go to and through their initial network link can go and buy stuff online and your site would get a percentage of what they paid for a product. [The product is not more expensive because of this.] I am still testing this stuff out for a money raising gig, but igive.com has been around for over 10 years and is reputable. I am sure there are others.

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