I have your credentials plus some. 25 years, am presently and solely responsible for two major Federal websites, one of which is DHS-used, and am very versatile with .NET, WCF, WPF, Sharepoint, Silverlight, web services, custom controls, SQL at any level.
So with my pedigree stated, I fail to see why this board cost gazllions to run each year.
They employ Jim Robinson, John Robinson, run a server farm, and have many millions of message records, as well as a high-traffic load.
My three websites, 2 of which have dynamic content, shopping carts, stream video and link to most social networking sites, total web hosting cost per month is 150 bucks.
No offense, but this is not very impressive. Shopping cards? Streaming video? Script kiddies can do this.
I would give you a small look into what it looks like to truly DEVELOP, but any details per the architecture of my systems would be a violation of my security agreement with them. Suffice it to say we're not doing shopping carts and streaming video and links to social network sites. Ha.
That The highest end dedicated, unlimited bandwidth server can be had for 1000 per month, and we are talking Facebook like data traffic there.
They aren't using GoDaddy or Small Business Planet. They have their own server farm.
There is no way, probability 0 that this site cost 70k a year in technical costs to manage, not possible. Technical costs cannot cost more than a few hundred per month, if they are are the board founder is getting ripped off.
You know not of what you speak. The board's founder is using his son. Sons tend not to rip off fathers.
For 100 bucks an hour and maybe 200 hours of total development and testing time, some shrink wrap PHP scripts for forums, and some other cheap addons I could write an ASP app that would do it all here with minimum maintenance.
Yeah right. Script kiddy. No offense, but that was buck-ignorant.
Don't give us this I'm an expert routine. Don't you know that everyone is an expert on FR. LOL!
I am with Laz on this. I have background, but mostly on Intranet educational applications. When you read ‘unlimited’ bandwidth- that really isn’t unlimited. Most hosting companies put caps on that and when you get into large amounts of traffic, they require dedicated servers and even back-up servers, exponentially increasing the costs- and that doesn’t even consider that FR runs their own, not going through external hosting. All one needs to do is look at operating budgets of similar sites. Both DU and KOS, (before KOS went commercial and DU stopped posting these numbers) were asking for more than $1Million/year (and we get more traffic than DU). I currently am working on a project simply to mirror host an LCMS and expect a fraction of the traffic that FR gets. Our implementation costs are $500K with $100K/year dedicated maintenance- again, with a fraction of the traffic and data FR uses.
Let’s look at the numbers. I don’t have them in front of me (and I don’t know the details) but from a high level, FR is asking for about $300K/year. From experience, I know that when you run a fundraiser, you can expect 1/3 to 1/2 of pledges not to come to fruition but I will be generous and assume FR takes in 2/3rds of what is pledged. That is $200K per year. If I understand, FR has 3 employees, Jim, Chris and John. $200K/year would only pay each of them $66K/year. I sure wouldn’t work for that. That is before you have even gone into one cent of actual operating costs. Now I’m sure all the estimates of where the money goes includes paying the aforementioned folks for their work.. but you get the point. (I’m sure I’ll be corrected on number of employees and costs, but this is just a round number for an example).
I’m sure there are ways technically to run it cheaper, but there is a price for autonomy. Is it the best platform? No, but as Jim said on another thread, feel free to step up and do it better. I’m sure you could outsource some of it to India or Romania but I am sure the PTBs here don’t even want to consider that nor would members like that.
Laz, you’re so sexy when you get tough.