Can't view pics

[Randy Davidson]

When trying to view the pics on the plans catagory I get a message that I am not signed in or the I don't have permission to view.

[Keith Outten]

Randy,

Send a Private Message to Aaron Koehl our System Administrator. Aaron has set the permissions for this Forum so that only Contributors can view the attachments and pictures. There are some configuration issues he is working on now that addresses the contributions made and the timeframe they were made (ie 2005, 2006, 2007).

The Project Plans Forum is the only one that is restricted here, the reason is based on the two meg file attachment limit and the fact that we hope to encourage everyone to donate each year. Those who made very large contributions will most likely be given permanent access to the Project Plans Forum as Aaron gets the Forum parameters completed.

Sometime in November we will be having our annual fund drive to collect donations for 2007. Anyone who donated in October will be included in the 2007 fund drive and receive the 2007 title or the new Members annual title and automatically receive access to our Project Plans Forum for the 2007 year. Aaron is looking into a means of eliminating the yearly class altogether by implementing a system that will track donations made via a Members annual date. This transition will take some time to setup and shakepout any configuration bugs.

When aaron has completed the configuration he will make a public announcement and explain the new procedure in detail.

[donnie wood]

What happened to forums being a place to share information? This is turning into a place to buy infomation. Can I charge for post where I help members, I don't think so. This needs some more thinking done on it.

[Keith Outten]

Donnie,

We need to pay the bills to stay online. Only 409 people donated last year out of over 9,500 registered so we thought this Forum would provide some incentive for people to support the Creek. Our suggested annual donation of six dollars ends up costing you 50 cents per month, even a student can afford to donate at this level.

All of our other Forums are still free with access to over 400,000 messages.

.

[donnie wood]

Since no one seems to agree with me, I will have to pay by the month . But then I think, what webpage can cost $57,000 a year to run?

9500 members
$6.00
_______
$57,000.00

Go figure, I did

[Jim Becker]

Don, what you're not considering is that the donations are voluntary and the "take rate" is low...a few hundred people, not thousands. Your numbers are not realistic, but the cost of running the site is not inexpensive. And there is no need to rehash what those costs are as it's been discussed before. And it's not chump-change. You'd know that if you did some real research.

Nobody says you need to contribute and the new plans forum is merely a way to help stimulate more donations from regular participants to help run and improve the community. Give if you want to. If not, that's OK, too.

[Mark Rios]

That's the thing Donnie, only a small percentage donate. So the suggested donation is what it is. If more donated, then it could be less. However, we also now pay Aaron to keep the Creek flowing smoothly, we try to, as I understand it, have the next years bandwidth costs available in advance, and we're also trying to get new server(s) to help with the tremendous load. THis has, and is, becoming an evermore popular place and the bandwidth demands are increasing along with it.

[Art Mulder]

Since no one seems to agree with me, I will have to pay by the month . But then I think, what webpage can cost $57,000 a year to run?

9500 members
$6.00
_______
$57,000.00

Go figure, I did

Donnie,

Your math is correct, but you used the wrong numbers. Keith stated that only 409 people contributed last year. 409 x $6 is a bit over $2400. That is really not much to run a high traffic web service.

Don't take this personally, Donnie. LOTS of people do not understand bandwidth, and yet bandwidth is key to managing a large web server. If you upload a 1MB file to a website, and 1000 people click on it to download, then you have just used up almost a Gigabyte of bandwidth -- 1001 times 1 MB. And that is just from ONE file. More files, more downloads, equals more bandwidth. Companies charge by the monthly bandwidth you use.

I have a friend who co-owns a web hosting company. They charge $159 per month, for a server with 150 GB/month of bandwidth and two 80GB disks. (if you mirror them, that is only 80GB of space).

I don't know exactly the SMC bandwidth and disk space needs, but I am sure that they are certainly no less than that.

So if you wanted to set up a web server at my friends company, you'd need on the order of 12x$159 or $1908 per year. Plus software. Plus labour. Plus any additional bandwidth you need. Check around at other companies and see what they charge. But take a reall close look at the bandwidth rules. Many companies oversell their bandwidth, and therefore do not guarantee minimum bandwidth to their clients.

best wishes, and welcome to SMC. It really is a great place.
...art

[Dennis Peacock]

Let's look at it this way:

Server cost - $200 per month
Power cost - $100 per month
Environmentals - $250 per month (include floor space cost)
Dedicated circuit from ISP: $1,400 per month
Software licensing/updates - $100 per month
Site Admin: $2,000 per month

Add this up and it's just about: $4,050 per month or $48,600 per year.
My numbers may be off, but when we were paying for a dedicated T1 circuit, it ran us around $1200 per month.

There are many variances in the cost of running a site. I've looked into this in the past and figured I'd have to work 3 jobs at my current salary to even pay the startup costs. Hardware can be rather expensive especially when there are many people putting a strain on the server/network loads on a forum and this requires components that are much more expensive that what we buy for our home PC's.

I don't know exactly what server hardware SMC is running, but take a very small server we run where I work. A single network interface card costs us just over $6,000 and a CPU replacement is $22,000 and these are the "cheap" servers. A serious server for internet services or number crunching can easily set you back a cool $500,000 to $14,000,000. I work on those boxes every day of every week for a living and have a pretty good idea of the startup and replacements costs for them.

In short? If every member of SMC was a contributor? Then there wouldn't be any real issues and the plans forum section would be free.

[donnie wood]

Wow, alot of info and money. I'm not trying to be troublemaker, but I had no idea that this website was as big as that. Until all this, all I knew is that alot of people had websites and that they must not be that expensive. But now maybe some others will read this and donate too. When you compare the info you get from the website to a magizine, the magizine dosn't compare. Then when you compare the cost why not send your money on a good website?


Keep up the good work

[Aaron Koehl]

Wow, alot of info and money. I'm not trying to be troublemaker, but I had no idea that this website was as big as that. Until all this, all I knew is that alot of people had websites and that they must not be that expensive. But now maybe some others will read this and donate too. When you compare the info you get from the website to a magizine, the magizine dosn't compare. Then when you compare the cost why not send your money on a good website?


Keep up the good work

Indeed, we're using an average of 85 Gigabytes of transfer (bandwidth) per month, with a peak at 98 Gigabytes.