This Forum (and Associated Sites) for Sale/Offer

[lardy]

Sad stuff having been a relative new member, i can see the potential of the site it's construction is a wonderful homebrew of info that once you have got over the abbreviations on the pages,starts to make sense then you realise that it's all there for you just waiting for you to seek the correct questions to be answered and sure you will have newbies like me coming on saying how do you do this, how do you do that without searching the answers that are out there, as we are green but in a couple of weeks it all comes good and it's a wonderful tool,
If rob is into staying on as steward/guardian of the site would this be an idea to raise funds (i am sure anyone who appreciates and values the site would be up for something like this) after a say two month trial period newbies like me are asked to contribute a small fee (i am guessing by the stats that the number of new members are known so as a relative amount of fee could derived to cover monthly costs.
I guess for this new members could recieve a forum sticker or some such thing?!
As the alternative is adverts all over the forum promoting bio diesel products pumps,tanks, heating elements etc though this would(rightly) reward the site owner for his blatant hard graft on this forum it would i guess make the whole site more difficult to navigate.
The third option is rather sad giving this forum away rob you deserve our support and i will duly flash you some cash next week upon my pay arriving not a drama your time has value and so does the forum regards Andy

[quicksilver]

Hello,

I like the concept of this site and may be interested in taking it over and buying it. How much are you wanting for it?

Thanks.

[craigcurtin]

Robert,

I sent you a PM last week but have not received a reply yet ?

regards

Craig

[Socrates]

I just joined an hour or so ago and this is the first thing I read as an official member.


How much effort does it take to run the site? If for sale, how much? Maybe with some further information a person or team of people might put up their hands. Do the associated websites need to be part of the forum. If the forum can run in isolation, is it much to maintain.

Would all members be prepared to donate a few bucks to the cause??

I am if it means we keep going.

Discussion??

[vyper]

How much are we talking (financially) to keep the website up and running (servers, domain, etc)?

I am happy to contribute a yearly donation.

I have been reading these forums for over a year now, but haven't taken it upon myself to sign up until yesterday.

Come on people, this is one resource we can't let go.

[Robert]

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

[Robert]

I should also just add that many suggestions have been made on ways for me to keep the site costs covered. That's all good, but it's not really want I'm wanting. I'm wanting someone else to be responsible from now on for keeping the costs covered. This can be done via user donations (barely if you are lucky). It can be done possibly very well, and maybe even profitably via google adwords/adsense for a site with good traffic like this one (the background server work with google tagging URLs has already been done on this site for google traffic stats). It can be done with membership subscriptions/fees (a less attractive idea). It can be done with selling ads and/or reciprocal links. Ads can be tuned to only be displayed to certain types (eg. not paying members).

The point is that if someone wants to take the responsibility of owning and running the forum and take the time to do it properly, it does not have to be a liability, but can actually be profitable. Turning a profit was never a motivation for me to run this forum, but in the rest of the real world, maybe that it what it takes to have someone willing to keep it going.

[darren leonadas]

Hi Robert, I can so much relate to where your at!! Totally understand where your at, as you know I've had my own heartbreaking experiences with MBDC. But mate you should be Bloody Proud of how far things have come since the days when we met at the BAA conference, and sucked in the sweet fumes of BD on the back of a Sydney Ferry. Remember not bing able to even buy the stuff, Now truckies line up at places like Fina and drain them dry.
Please Contact me about the terms offered for Melbournebiodiesel.org , I think James and I may come to some sort of arrangement. I would be extremely disappointed if Someone doesn't put up their hand to carry on the baton for biofuelsforum. But as you Know I don't think I have the capacity.
Lets keep in touch any how, BIG Cheers, Darren.
??How about the ATA ?? Do they have a IT techy.?

[Delica98]

Just want to thank you Robert for this site and all the hard work and $ you've put into it.

It is a real credit to you and all the BD and SVO/WVO community who contribute their ideas and expertise.

I hope someone is able to take it over and keep running it.