Kevin Tarr wrote:
> Okay, really the last: My hometown has a message board/forum. They were > seeking donations to keep it open. While the price was nominal I was > wondering how much it really costs to operate something like this. I'm not > considering this as a business venture, but I'm wondering along these > lines: if someone in their house set up a computer that was dedicated for a > forum what would it take to do correctly? Could an older 'puter do it with > a different OS? I'm not worried about the costs, unless it was > astronomical. If a person already has a cable modem and a router, other > than the computer cost and the electricity (and the time) it should be > free, right? We should be able to get a free URl, because it's not for > profit? I'm probably very confused about this. The less you do something > the more you forget.
Setting up something at your house would depend some on your internet provider. Dan was able to have a server at our house when we were getting our internet service through the provider I'd been working for, but when they got sold and dropped the DSL customers (without warning -- but that's another rant altogether), and we switched to just going straight through SBC, we couldn't anymore for some reason or another.
Not being for profit doesn't have anything to do with costs of having a domain name. I belong to a nonprofit organization that ended up going with the best deal someone could find on keeping the domain registered (don't remember how much or with whom, but you can shop around to find the best deal) and with addr.com to provide the web hosting. addr.com is good for the website stuff, Dan and I have had some glitches with them on our POP accounts, but nothing bad enough to get us to switch who we've got our domain with -- just delays, no major *loss* of e-mail. That's just one provider, the one that someone decided would be best for the organization's needs after some research (this was back in 2000 or 2001) and we just went with it for our personal stuff because it was a vaguely known quantity.
$80/year would cover domain registration and web hosting *somewhere*.
Julia
And here's the third side to the circle. I had asked some of the people in charge, the ones complaining about the costs, why the high school doesn't have one set up, first as a project, then as a learning tool. The 'real' forum could be kept off limits to kids so they don't mess anything up, but it'd still be a great thing to have around. That was like throwing a cat into the K-9 pen. These people were mad that high school kids were posting on the board, even when half the topics were about the sports teams or kids getting into trouble.
Kevin T. - VRWC
You can't please all of the people all of the time, but you can please me in ten minutes or less.
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