Hello! Hope all is well and that everyone had an enjoyable holiday season. The time has come again to renew our hosting package for the JL Forum. I want to give you an update on the state of the forum as well as allow everyone to voice their opinion on hosting options for 2009.
As you may know I am currently enjoying my time as a medical resident in Cincinnati. The hours are long (approximately 80 hours/week) and I haven't been able to dedicate as much time as I would like to updating the forum. I have continued to spend about 2 hours per week maintaining and updating the site. This includes creating site backups, answering emails/PMs, fixing any errors in the database and optimizing the site to function smoothly. I have enjoyed the responsibility of managing the forum and, as long as you all are OK with it, would like to continue on for many years to come. There have been some issues with the server so that over the past few weeks things have not been running as smoothly. We have had significant downtimes of late. I have managed to have an administrator at our hosting company make some adjustments to the server and things in my opinion have improved tremendously. (Correct me if I'm wrong). One of his suggestions was to upgrade our dedicated server to one that is more powerful which would help improve the overall performance as we continue to grow. Currently we run a single core Pentium 4 2.4Ghz with 2 GB of RAM (upgraded RAM last year). Cost for the server is currently $174.00 per month + $300 one time fee for the RAM upgrade. We are hosted at Hostgator.com. I would like your opinions on how you would like to proceed with 2009 hosting options and then put things to a vote. I would understand if many of you are thinking perhaps we should move to vBulletin because it is more reliable software. Unfortunately at this point I do not think this is an option for me to reformat such a forum with all of my other commitments. This does however remain an option if you all would like to pass the responsibility to a new administrator. I certainly would understand, no hurt feelings.
So, here's what I think are some good options for the upcoming year and you all can chime in and let me know what you think.
1) Renew our hosting contract with Hostgator with an upgrade to the "Elite" server package (Dual-Core 3040 Xeon (Conroe) at $279/month = $3348/year
2) Keep the same contract and continue to make adjustments to the server to optimize performance. $174/month = $2088/year
3) Cancel our current contract with Hostgator and move the forum to different server/host. With this option someone on the board would need to coordinate the move as this is too much of a time commitment for me.
4) ______________________ (your comments, suggestions here)
In any case the forum will continue to depend on the donations of our members to keep things going. At the very least we will need to raise approx. $2088 to renew our contract. In the past this has not been a problem.
So, let me know how you guys would like to proceed. I am open to any novel ideas, suggestions, and criticisms. This is your time to make your opinions known.
Thank you
Daniel
Admin
[email protected]
As you may know I am currently enjoying my time as a medical resident in Cincinnati. The hours are long (approximately 80 hours/week) and I haven't been able to dedicate as much time as I would like to updating the forum. I have continued to spend about 2 hours per week maintaining and updating the site. This includes creating site backups, answering emails/PMs, fixing any errors in the database and optimizing the site to function smoothly. I have enjoyed the responsibility of managing the forum and, as long as you all are OK with it, would like to continue on for many years to come. There have been some issues with the server so that over the past few weeks things have not been running as smoothly. We have had significant downtimes of late. I have managed to have an administrator at our hosting company make some adjustments to the server and things in my opinion have improved tremendously. (Correct me if I'm wrong). One of his suggestions was to upgrade our dedicated server to one that is more powerful which would help improve the overall performance as we continue to grow. Currently we run a single core Pentium 4 2.4Ghz with 2 GB of RAM (upgraded RAM last year). Cost for the server is currently $174.00 per month + $300 one time fee for the RAM upgrade. We are hosted at Hostgator.com. I would like your opinions on how you would like to proceed with 2009 hosting options and then put things to a vote. I would understand if many of you are thinking perhaps we should move to vBulletin because it is more reliable software. Unfortunately at this point I do not think this is an option for me to reformat such a forum with all of my other commitments. This does however remain an option if you all would like to pass the responsibility to a new administrator. I certainly would understand, no hurt feelings.
So, here's what I think are some good options for the upcoming year and you all can chime in and let me know what you think.
1) Renew our hosting contract with Hostgator with an upgrade to the "Elite" server package (Dual-Core 3040 Xeon (Conroe) at $279/month = $3348/year
2) Keep the same contract and continue to make adjustments to the server to optimize performance. $174/month = $2088/year
3) Cancel our current contract with Hostgator and move the forum to different server/host. With this option someone on the board would need to coordinate the move as this is too much of a time commitment for me.
4) ______________________ (your comments, suggestions here)
In any case the forum will continue to depend on the donations of our members to keep things going. At the very least we will need to raise approx. $2088 to renew our contract. In the past this has not been a problem.
So, let me know how you guys would like to proceed. I am open to any novel ideas, suggestions, and criticisms. This is your time to make your opinions known.
Thank you
Daniel
Admin
[email protected]
