Forum Overhead Costs (see: donation banner) point to the wrong Web Host being used!

[Toad]

I noticed the banner asking for donations ($75 per/month), to help pay the overhead costs involved with this forum and that's absurd, given that you can get an entire year of hosting services for less-than 50-bucks at Powweb and they also don't charge for bandwidth usage.

http://www.powweb.com

We've been using them for our hosting services for our businesses for 20 years now and we've never had any problems and I had my own online forum for a couple of years (numismatic related) and I never had any additional costs, other than my initial hosting fees and domain registration fees.

It's just a suggestion, to help the owner of this place save a few greenbacks ... .. .

Ribbit

[vitrag24]

I noticed the banner asking for donations ($75 per/month), to help pay the overhead costs involved with this forum and that's absurd, given that you can get an entire year of hosting services for less-than 50-bucks at Powweb and they also don't charge for bandwidth usage.

http://www.powweb.com]

We've been using them for our hosting services for our businesses for 20 years now and we've never had any problems and I had my own online forum for a couple of years (numismatic related) and I never had any additional costs, other than my initial hosting fees and domain registration fees.

It's just a suggestion, to help the owner of this place save a few greenbacks ... .. .

Ribbit

Thanks for your feedback Toad.

I haven't changed it since a long, even noticed it today only after a long time after your post.

Well, cost of hosting isnt an issue unless we are planning for more bandwidth, but cost of software upgrades, custom mods, developer, designer etc. is quite more.

It has been many years, and previously we have several donations and vip members, at that time , we were having 10+ moderators from different part of the world, several contests regularly, more activity updates, more plugin etc.

But since few years, hardly we receive any donations and active users, so we are not even upgrading our forum software, adding more add-ons etc. It is even more than our goal, if we maintain it verywell and update regularly.

But i still have plans in future, i will develop it more academic as well as discussion oriented. I have plan to add more quiz and update it on regular basis for students as well as practitioners too, so we can update our knowledge and ideas around the world.

We have several good plugins of VbLinks, Quiz etc, but due to money constrains we could not update it and stopped using it.

So overall, donations are needed for improvisation of forum, more upgrades, driving more active moderators and other stuffs, hosting is just small part of it, which i am paying out of my pocket right now, somewhat from google ads.

Even if users do not donate, their activity matters the most, before 5 years, MedicalGeek was among top 5 medical related search results and very good alexa rank too, but later on, me as well as other moderators got busy with personal and professional life , so it is less active now, i am just keeping it alive as i have plans in future to make it more interactive platform again.

I hope you got our vision and will support it.