Sorry to everyone for not replying to this until now. Not enough time is one of the other reasons that makes me have to let this site go. I appreciate the donations to recover my costs, but it's not just about the money. Even if I didn't have to dip into my own pocket at all, I just can't run this anymore - it's someone else's turn.
I will reply to all the private messages and get back with some more specific costs over the weekend when I get a moment, but in the mean time, I'll answer some of the broader questions about ongoing costs in here first:
How much does it cost to run? How long is a piece of string? You can find cheap hosting deals everywhere, some in AU, some in the US, it doesn't really matter too much, as long as you are sure that whatever bandwidth the users of this site will suck is covered by your hosting agreement going out. There are a few things that a potential site admin/owner should consider with hosting/running this site:
- I mentioned before that the bandwidth of the site is growing and is currently in the 10-15G/month area. I'd budget for that to increase maybe 10% every few months. As oil gets more expensive, more people get googling and experimenting, so the traffic is only going to rise.
- Storage space. The site currently would take just under 500Mb. This will grow as more users upload images/attachments and the userbase expands. Also with a few of the newer features I've added, members have the ability to store their own gallery images on the site, which will help to use more storage space.
- Feature set. The host would need to make sure that a few of the basics are provided. These are pretty much standard with most hosts, but sometimes there can be some hidden nasties. As long as the host can offer mySQL and PHP support (recent versions), you should be fine.
- Server load. Many webhosts will sell you a package that is run on a shared server - that is the server hosts many other websites as well, but only displays yours when the correct URL is requested from it. As a forum does not just display static content, but instead will generate dynamic content as a user requests it, every time a page is loaded, the server has to do work. Also, behind the scenes, there are scripts that re-process every URL and turn it into google friendly URLs based on the content of the page, so for operations like that, the processing power and load would be higher than normal. There are also maintenance tasks that are run at regular intervals in the background with the database and loads of stuff that isn't worth getting into here. The point is, that as a forum gets large, it can sometimes want to run on its own dedicated server, not just on a shared host.
As an example, here is a host that I've used for my company's site (though not for any of the biofuels stuff) that offer a
yearly package of $330 that looks like it would cover it. This is for shared hosting. If you wanted to do a dedicated server, you could look at something
like this (annual cost just over $2k), which would cover the load, storage and bandwidth, but you'd also have a bit more cost, reponsibility and possibly administrative effort to run it. You could also go for co-location (which is how I'm running it at the moment out of Switzerland), which means putting your own server in someone else's datacentre and then they charge you for rack space, power and bandwidth, but you then have to take a lot more care with everything as you have to own and run the entire server. On this
example package, you would pay $1.6k per year if you had your own server. Of course, you could also try to host it on a PC in your garage off the back of your home ADSL connection for very little money, but I would not recommend this if you want to do it properly. You might also find cheaper deals in the US or other areas, but then you have to consider that if you have to contact your hosting provider for support in a different timezone, you may get nasty problems.
Please feel free to do your own research to get a better idea of what your costs may be.
The only other costs aside from bandwidth and storage/housing (which can usually be taken care of by a hosting provider package, as above) will be ongoing software licensing fees and domain renewal fees. The only 2 software licenses here will be vbulletin and vbseo, which cost just over $300 (combined) to own, and then just under $100/year to renew. The domain renewals can be as low as US$10 per site name. I had a fair few names, which can help with the google rankings. If you included Australian domains in here ($60/year) you could budget for between $10 and $200 year dependind on what you did.
The only other consideration is of course time and effort. At the point that the forum is at now, you would have to spend maybe a few hours a week maintaining it, installing security fixes, responding to idiot requests, propping up software glitches etc. There is far more that the forum could be doing as well and if you wanted to, you could easily spend 10-20 hours a week for many months and get the site really "up there". I have already spend uncountable hours over a few years building it up from scratch and getting it to where it is now. Google rankings are not to be treated lightly and much effort behind the scenes has been spent on this.
I will try to respond to everyone's PMS and emails soon, so apologies again for my tardiness, I just thought a bulk explanation in here would satisfy lots of requests first.
I am also considering just putting the site(s)
up for auction here. If I do go down that path, then anyone who is interested from here could bid on it there. Just an idea so far, I've not made any real investigations into this yet.
I did consider that depending on whoever ends up taking over, I could provide a few weeks/months of assistance to get up to speed on everything and make sure that the forum kept in the right direction, but it will depend on many subjective factors and I don't really want to still be burdened with too much load.
Of course the other big question is "how much?"
I've not set any price on it yet, I thought I'd wait and see who the potential buyers would be. It would range from free if it were a passionate ethical individual to $???? if it were a commercial entity. It really depends on who wants it, why they want it, what they want to do with it and if they are able to run it properly. That was one reason that I considered an auction, as that would be an easy way to decide how much among a community of people who already understand websites.