How much do you pay for your forum/site ?

[Cedric]

What are the running costs of your forum or website ? Thinking about hosting, domains, SSL certificates, software licenses, add ons, styles, etc.

Are your running costs covered by the income of your forum, or do you invest privately ? Do you have donations to help with the running costs ?

 

[Cory]

$0.00, literally. Since I use Jcink and I do it all as a hobby I wouldn't invest much money into the forum. I would never have to pay for codes or designs since me and my online friend can cover those areas, and the domain seems short enough where a custom one isn't necessary.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

For all my websites and server and all that stuff

Maybe $3,500 a year.

That's domain name costs, CDNs, VPS, software renewal, theme renewal, premium addon renewal, etc.

 

[Arantor]

This year, around $3000 in total across domains, hosting and licences for all projects. The licences aren't the big part in that though.

 

[Cedric]

For all my websites and server and all that stuff

Maybe $3,500 a year.

That's domain name costs, CDNs, VPS, software renewal, theme renewal, premium addon renewal, etc.

This year, around $3000 in total across domains, hosting and licences for all projects. The licences aren't the big part in that though.

Damn you two. I thought a grand was much.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

Damn you two. I thought a grand was much.

It's a big hobby for me. But I do make enough on one blog (ads) for about 2,100 of it. My ads pay for the hosting costs at least.

But if they didn't I can still afford it but I like when it pays for itself

 

[Cedric]

It's a big hobby for me. But I do make enough on one blog (ads) for about 2,100 of it. My ads pay for the hosting costs at least.

But if they didn't I can still afford it but I like when it pays for itself

What blog earns you $2100? That’s a nice amount for a blog, so you must be doing something right with that.

Any hobby costs money, some more than others, but I’m satisfied as long as I can pay for it.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

What blog earns you $2100? That’s a nice amount for a blog, so you must be doing something right with that.

Any hobby costs money, some more than others, but I’m satisfied as long as I can pay for it.

My hiking blog runs adsense. I post a new article every single day. I promote articles on social media, Patreon, and through email.

I usually make right under $200 a month on adsense ads.

 

[timewo]

I spend about $5000 or more annually on domains, webhosting and this year I will not cover the cost because I have not sold any premium domain. Usually I sell at least one domain for more than $1000 once every few years .

 

[Mamberroi Jr]

For all my websites and server and all that stuff

Maybe $3,500 a year.

That's domain name costs, CDNs, VPS, software renewal, theme renewal, premium addon renewal, etc.

For that sum I would take your site all year round

 

[Jason]

I will eventually have to renew my .com and two .ink extensions. Now, at the moment, I pay $5 a month for hosting. I pay every two months.

Of course, I am using a free theme and a Xenforo 2 licence I paid for in 2019 probably.

 

[kensonplays]

My domain is like 9.15/yr through cloudflare registrar. I haven't renewed my XF license since there's no need to right now (I have 2.2.12 as latest, .13 is most recent, I'll be waiting for a big enough patch that makes it worth renewing), and a few addon registrations, probably a couple hundred a year or so? Since XF would take almost half of it.

 

[Cory]

Well, I recently bought a custom domain for my Jcink board, so I guess I pay a little over $10.00 a year for it now.

 

[Ravenfreak]

Let's see, to renew my hosting it will cost me over $100. My domain names will be around $20 to renew, and to renew my Woltlab License it will cost me around $66 in a year. I haven't purchased a new theme for my forum yet, I ended up getting a free one. I thought about eventually purchasing the Clanz extension which are essentially the Woltlab equivalent of IPB's clubs. I haven't checked to see how much that will cost me yet, as I'm still not sure if I want to get it yet.

 

[Jason]

Of course, if you used a subdomain on Forumotion or something, you'd pay nothing. Also, if .tk etc. was still around you could put that on free hosting somewhere and pay nothing.

 

[Tracy]

Overall... probably a minimum of $2500 a year for all my sites - Gods honest truth.. I don't track it.
That includes domains renewals, software renewals (not initial costs), add-on renewals and similar.
And nope, I recover the grand total of ZERO dollars from them.
The base fact is.. they are a hobby for me... and all hobbies cost money.

 

[vbgamer45]

My journey started with free hosting, then moved to dedicated servers, then to colocation with full rack.

I remember when I was starting out with forum hosting spending thousands per month to dedicated sever companies. Then switched to colocation which made way more sense a fraction of the cost. And the biggest part for me is control of your data! I have had cases in the past were data was held hostage and that pushed me to go that route. Also, I control the hardware and able to build it to my needs. The hardware you can get for low cost and have had servers running 8 years or more. I generally try to replace every six to eight years though, mainly to get new operating systems and keep things current.

 

[Cedric]

My journey started with free hosting, then moved to dedicated servers, then to colocation with full rack.

I remember when I was starting out with forum hosting spending thousands per month to dedicated sever companies. Then switched to colocation which made way more sense a fraction of the cost. And the biggest part for me is control of your data! I have had cases in the past were data was held hostage and that pushed me to go that route. Also, I control the hardware and able to build it to my needs. The hardware you can get for low cost and have had servers running 8 years or more. I generally try to replace every six to eight years though, mainly to get new operating systems and keep things current.

What amount of forums do you host if you still do? And at what amount of data do we speak then? I'm genuinely curious about stuff like that.

 

[vbgamer45]

I run SMF, MyBB, phpBB based forums.
SMF i would say little over 55k. Over the lifetime probably over 500k forums made.
phpbb 1k. Legacy
MyBB 5k
Two webservers and one dbserver.
Optimized though I did the code for the platforms.

Data is not that much probably 800gb for files and dbs probably 400gb

 

[Cedric]

I run SMF, MyBB, phpBB based forums.
SMF i would say little over 55k. Over the lifetime probably over 500k forums made.
phpbb 1k. Legacy
MyBB 5k
Two webservers and one dbserver.
Optimized though I did the code for the platforms.

Data is not that much probably 800gb for files and dbs probably 400gb

That's awesome. It was always a dream of mine to do the same but I didn't have the knowledge for it. Still don't. Of those softwares, which one do you personally recommend and had the lowest error statistics?