Let's give them a chance.

 

VerticalScope are the conglomerate that bought the last forum I frequented. I'm not comfortable talking trash, but I'll say the veteran members didn't like the changes (slow at first, more aggressive as time went on). Those members went off and created their own free forum (no ads, voluntary donations, etc) and then they were sued by VerticalScope

 

Sued by whom?

 

Some more of a back story would be interesting.

 

Agree... All of our posted data, including photos and provided emails addresses were sold. It would be interesting to learn more about the new owners who we entrust our data with.....

JLG

 

As I said before, let's not jump to conclusions. To quote a great teacher: "Patience, grasshopper." Let's see where the new owners take things, what changes and what doesn't. So far things don't appear to be much different.

 

I'm with ya meyer. Gotta give 'em a chance.

 

What's it cost to run a site like this?

 

Really depends on traffic.

Most of it comes down to hosting costs.

More traffic the more costs.

Initially for good performance you get a decent server, either a VM instance or a dedicated host with a decent pipe, most guys starting out go the per transfer instead of the per MB commit, that way they can get a larger pipe (usually shared instead of dedicated)
More traffic that comes in the more bandwidth is consumed, per user it really isn't much and the biggest hit is going to the the IO on the database(s).

most of these sites aren't built with scaling in mind. They're built out of love for the hobby (in this case our C7's) so they don't think of what it takes to operate a site that gets 100,000+ hits a day (not sure what this site gets but would think it isn't a ton comparatively speaking).

Using out of the box forum software can be an issue as well, as it produces unnecessary IO & bandwidth consumption as well so custom development is generally needed to scale. Which most hobbyist aren't equipped for.

If you went out and got a VM and put a site up it would cost you about 4 dollars a month up until you started getting any real traffic. Before you know it you could be on the hook for hundreds in storage/bandwidth costs.
(instances on AWS and other VPS's use a storage/RAM per GB model, more traffic you get the more of both you'll need)

This is very general and I'm not being overly specific and do not speak for this site. they may self host with dedicated gear in a colocated datacenter with dedicated bandwidth for all I know and in that scenario you would be looking at something similar to this, a full cabinet is about 499+ then electrical 20A 120V x 2 400+ and bandwidth lets say 100Mb synchronous dedicated pipe is 200 - 700 depending on carrier, peers, quality etc.

so just to answer the question.

anywhere from 5 dollars to 2000+ a month.

some of these hobbyist are too proud too, another forum I frequent the guy that ran it was asking for donations every single month, I offered to host the entire site for him for free just because I liked the site. He refused and would rather beg for donations to keep the site running.

Others sell, I can't blame them, if you had a site that you really didn't have the technical prowess to scale with your user base, selling it to an org that does is idea.

 

yah you pretty much got it, you also have to keep in mind a single server can serve up more than one site.
in this case this very server is also hosting:

So for example this site could be running like a potato with 4 users online, thats because another site hosted on this same server has 40 billion users.

Makes sense to me. How do you know "this very server" is hosting those forums?

 

Makes sense to me. How do you know "this very server" is hosting those forums?

 

^^^thanks for the details!!

 

In case anyone is curious.

stingrayforum appears on a cursory glance to be running vbulletin 4.2.0 hopefully it's patched as 4.x.x has tons of exploitable holes and they've removed the install directory.

Also, vbulletin offers two pricing models, subscription based and license based.

Buy vBulletin 5 Connect
&
vBulletin Cloud


I would recommend not using the same password you use for important things like online banking and the like on forums. They're usually poorly maintained in the way of security and are popular targets because of that.

 

Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, what????????????????????????????????????

 

I'm not sure if there is a link to the change in ownership, but the system seems to be running a lot slower now.

 

Hello Mr. Roboto er lobsterroboto. Not worried. Graph looks crazy. Gotta look at it more. Still not sure. The IP means nothing to me. Great drawing. Don't care if the owners manage other forums and are located in Canada.

 

Hello Mr. Roboto er lobsterroboto. Not worried. Graph looks crazy. Gotta look at it more. Still not sure. The IP means nothing to me. Great drawing.

okay so here it is in a nutshell, an "IP address" is basically the house number for a system on the internet. DNS or domain name is a way to associate easier to remember names with IP's.

So instead of saying go to 1234 road dr, city state you can say go to "boomers house" Boomers house just translates into 1234 road dr, city state. That physical address is maintained by the powers that be (in the case of IP space it's ARIN for north america) so everyone knows how to get to any address. names just make it easier.

Now if you have a roommate, named Roomer you could say go to Roomers house and it would also translate to 1234 road dr, city state.

Now that we have your physical address (easy to get with "ping address.com or dig address.com etc etc) you can have a search engine search that IP address specifically.
So in bing I typed IP:x.x.x.x (where "x" is the IP of stingrayforums.com) the results are basically every name that points back at that same address. So in the above screenshot all those search results are sites that are hosted at the same address.

Nothing fancy, I was just curious about it with the new owners and the recent breach and stuff.

 

I scanned the early part and know all that. Did not mean to infer I did not know what an IP address is.

cool, you never know especially on a non tech forum. Lots of people from all walks of life on here.