im still very curious about all this hosting business. i mean you can get decent hosting from free-£15 a month. does a forum like this really need its own server? obviously it would be better, but how noticable is it?
looking at the previous page, I suggest that you try something.
save the page. look at the saved files and delete all the adverts.
then look at the total size of the data, it's around 600KB (half a meg).
shared Microsoft server hosting at 1&1 is £12 per month, with a storage limit of 4GB and a traffic limit of 40GB per month.
we've established that there are perhaps 200 members.
and I'll say that I'm a fairly light user I might view perhaps 40 pages a day.
(that's 20MB per day, and roughly 600MB per month)
so with 200 active members that's roughtly 120,000MB (120GB) of traffic per month.
that pushes you into the needing the professional package that it £33 a month for this domain only, (not to mention David's other domains, -though for the sake of argument we'll assume that there is advertising there and they also pay for themselves).
so for £33 a month you get probably enough space, and just enough traffic for light users of this site.
though heavier users will probably view closer to 100 pages a day. (if all 200 did that you need a traffic limit of 600GB/month -just for this site). -and at £1 per GB traffic cost over the 200GB limit that puts the price of running just CF at £430 per month...
now assume that the other domains that david hosts on the servers take up even half of that, you're probably knocking on the door of 1TB per month data going in and out of the server. i.e once you've used up the first 200GB and then 800GB more you've got a very (very) large bill landing on the mat if you go with a shared server.
now look at the dedicated servers.
£90 a month gets you 2 x 2core processors and a couple of gigs of ram - probably enough to run a forum, but with unlimited traffic.
500GB of space too.
even the most expensive package runs at only £300 p/m for 2.25TB of storage space 16GB of ram and 8 processing cores...
but I digress...
the point I'm making is quite easy.
with shared hosting offering limited space, limited traffic and added traffic billing that could push hosting costs into around £1000 per month...
why wouldn't you go with the dedicated option?
and to come back on this thread, having gone out and posted some real figures from a hosting provider...
when the cost to david is going to be possibly nearing £1000 a year, (assuming he has cheaper hosting that 1&1) then why all the fuss about a little button underneath your name that helps keep this place going.
this is, pretty much a massive forum. and hosting doesn't pay for it's self.
if adverts are needed, then I personally would much rather that they are small adverts like those buttons than massive in line ads that take up the space that a normal posting would.