Where does my money go?

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Man, I wish I were rich. WrongPlanet is draining me like there is no tomorrow.

Did you know I had to empty my savings account to pay for WrongPlanet last month? I went from a couple of hundred in savings to 1 measly digit. I think it's about 7 bucks now.

And to top that off, I just got a PM from someone telling me how much they hate me for using wrongPlanet to make money. I haven't made a single dime from WrongPlanet. I've spent way more of my money than I'd ever dream of getting from this site.

Anyway, anyone else wish they had more money?

I only want more so I can spend it to restore a few cars. I have some in mind...

I hear you. I wish I had the money to fix the roof so that when the rains come (and despite the drought they *will* come) I won't spend three months chasing buckets.

I wish I could afford to follow "doctor's orders" and quit the stressful job and stay home on disability, but I can't and so I don't. But all day long I get to talk to people who are in much better shape then me (medically) who are at home, on disability.

I wish I could afford to buy my son every train he wants, because it's worth it to me to see the joy in his face when he hooks them up and watches them go round and round.

I wish I could afford one trip to England for him, to see this "London Eye" I hear so much about lately every waking hour of every day!!

But we have what we have, and we are glad for it. We own our home (the part we don't still owe to the bank that is!) and own our cars outright. We have little debt. We do what we can for who we can when we can, but always wish it were more.

So yes, I wish I had more money. I don't know that we'd be any happier, but we always want what we don't have.

I'd like to donate to public radio, listener-supported web radio, and some charitable individuals who have been (perhaps literally) life-savers for me.

And then there are student loans to consider.

I firmly believe some serious good Karma points accrue to those who open up communication avenues for AS/autie people. If I could offer more than my best wishes, you'd get a cut.

Alex, what is Underdog charging you most for? Are they nickeling and diming you on throughput or disk space? I've noticed the cPanel Pro has 1000 Mb. of space and 40 Gb. of transfer a month. Are you exceeding that?

I use www.cedant.com and really like them. They have a Premier account for 4000 Mb. of storage and UNLIMITED transfer per month. If it is the transfer that is getting you, Cedant might be the way to go. I've been using Cedant for years and I have yet to see it go down. $25.95 for that. You must be getting at least that in donations (I hope!)

Not sure about phpBB though. I know I have a lot of custom PERL scripts and I paid for the ability to use JSP on there as well (I'm at $18 and change/mo).

I always want what is going away from me, and money does just that!!

I'll believe that when I see bank records and receipts for the hosting costs.

I'm like doubling underdogs top plan.

I'm also spending money on other shizzle too so hosting isn't whatz running me out the most.

The hosting costs for sites like these are small until the usage balloons. Then, the hosters start nickeling and diming to death. I can totally understand why this site would be expensive, particularly if it is running on a dedicated server. There are 3,843 users registered at the time I'm writing this. There are 154 reading and posting. Then, there are the photos (which no doubt must be taking up a MASSIVE amount of space). So many posts can add up pretty quick too, particularly if they are not compressed (I'm not sure how phpBB works -- does it use a MySQL server? I've gotta check. If so, sometimes you get charged extra just to do that too.)

That unlimited throughput from Cedant might make a huge difference. Or, Alex, perhaps you can convince Underdog Hosting to lower the price to keep the site? Given the massive amount of hits you get from people who are likely to be into computers, that gives you a potential advertising card you could play too. They might find it far more desirable to have their logo on your site than the extra money they are charging you. On today's Internet, visibility is gold. The click-thru rate would be stellar, me thinketh.

Yowsers! That'll dent the checkbook!

Then he shouldn't mind letting his membership drop substantially and letting other AS site owners take on the financial burden.

I'm having this very familiar feeling there is a whole lot I'm not understanding about this conversation... or, that I've butted in on something I should have. If so, I apologize!

I bet you could save a lot of storage space by deleting subversive posts and bandwidth by disabling PMs.

He already does the former and I've been waiting for him to start doing the latter.

I'm glad this boards are so heavily moderated. I think by "subversive" posts, you mean posts that undermine the goal of the site, which is to create a supportive network of aspies. That must take a lot of work to do, too. There are lots of people who just want to hurt others out on the Internet.

Do people use the PM'ing as much as they post, I wonder? If so, maybe that might help a little. But, text can be compressed really well. Images, on the other hand, do not compress quite so well. Perhaps if we lost the avatars, or only allowed off-site linking to avatars? That might help the throughput too, since if they are hosted on wrongplanet.net, they will be going through Alex's pipe instead of someone else's, counting against his bandwidth.

Alex have You ever thought truly thought of selling shares to off set monetary problems like on the Stock Market? That does spread the risk around to the share holders then.