Hardware is expensive and has a limited lifespan. I’m curious to know if Jim and John have priced out the cost of hosting freerepublic.com in the cloud on AWS or Azure? There would be huge reliability gains to be made by going that route and a lot of convenience, too.
Reliability gains, etc. would be offset by a Bezos-type stooge mining our data, causing 'accidental' disruptions, privacy issues, etc.
There's no such thing as a cloud. It is just outsourcing to let somebody else manage your infrastructure.
And the total cost of operation would be a lot less I'd be willing to wager.