Donation on a forum

[Shannon Apple]

Last forum of ours cost 1200 dollars a year to run

This is around the same cost I am looking at with both my forums so without donations it is a given that it becomes very hard for one person to maintain these costs.

How are small forums costing this though? The one that I mentioned had more than 250GB of traffic, 3.5 million posts, 120k accounts. It was bigger than FP, was number 1 in the google search for popular search term and needed a cloud server at 100 dollars a month or thereabouts. Actually, a burden for the one who paid the bills (wasn't me TG) more or less because it wasn't making anything. That one is a long story, but if it had been the primary site for that guy, he might have made the effort to monetise it. It was just his hobby. He had money making sites.

Google ranking doesn't exist now, but it did then. I am sure that you could reduce your costs significantly and make it so much easier on yourself financially. That just sounds crazy that you'd be paying out that much. We're running SC small scale atm and the new server is sufficient. As it grows, we'll add donation button back. But, we have more than enough donation money saved up to run that site into the next year and beyond, plus add some extras that the community want.

 

[DaveM]

@Shannon Apple That works out at around $600 per year per forum on a dedicated server, this also includes license updates and development of each forum as needed.

 

[Shannon Apple]

Yeah, still seems like a lot 🙂