Kermit,Originally Posted by Kermit Hodges
What you will find is that most commercial hosting services will start off cheap and get more and more expensive as your bandwith consumption increases. Also a site like ours can consume the majority of a servers clock cycles and consequently slow down any other sites the machine hosts. When any of this happens you get a warning that your hosting fee is going sky high.
In the long run it is cheaper to host SMC on our server in our office, it is more work for us though. There is also the matter of being able to configure your own server to fit your needs. Rarely would you be able to have the necessary access level on someone else's machine to configure and install software to meet your needs.
Of course we would like to be able to afford a Sun systems server but the cost of a commercial server is way over our budget at this point. Should the majority of our active Members donate six bucks we would have more than enough to purchase a commercial server and double our bandwidth. As of this morning our Donation Fund Drive has received donations from 103 Members and 1 Guest. We are not even close to being half way to our bare bones costs for the year but we fully expect to meet at least our annual financial needs.
Note that even though we have removed our Guests ability to view pictures there are still more Guests logged into The Creek this morning than Members.
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