Cost of starting a Forum

[Accessing]

I thought this was an interesting article to share here, originally shared over Halo Waypoint in a conversation around Halowaypoints soon to be end. 

[ https://adjourn.audent.io/how-much-does-it-cost-to-start-a-forum-or-online-community/ ] 

[Anna Richards]

How much are you spending here to keep this forum up?

[Guest]

Howdy I've thought about creating a forum just for fun and just to see rather or not people would join. Even tho at first, I thought it would be easy to start one but after looking at the much stuff that was going to be added and everything. I've chosen to not start one and just join ones that were already created and etc. But maybe in the future, I would think about creating one but until then I'll just enjoy the ones that I'm currently in.  

[Accessing]

On 7/19/2023 at 12:26 AM, Anna Richards said:

How much are you spending here to keep this forum up?

I still need to publish all of the finances, but the site is run at $45/m with 6 month pay cycles of additional charges for some of the add-ons we have. We're on a plan no longer offered and grandfathered in with Invision, which I am happy about because we're not paying so much but its most likely going to change soon. 

On 7/21/2023 at 4:50 PM, Donut said:

Howdy I've thought about creating a forum just for fun and just to see rather or not people would join. Even tho at first, I thought it would be easy to start one but after looking at the much stuff that was going to be added and everything. I've chosen to not start one and just join ones that were already created and etc. But maybe in the future, I would think about creating one but until then I'll just enjoy the ones that I'm currently in.  

I appreciate that, if there is an opportunity to help I will. The forum space overall is in decline its always nice seeing new forums, new names and thats greatly underappreciated. For Halo this forums really solid but some of my other hobbies including cars and pets have forums that are typically full of ads, spam and click jacking. Its definitely hard to not do that but hopefully I can get more support to keep this far from all of that.   

[Roland]

Good insight into the costs, can you break it down? How can I donate without subscribing, Its just easier for me to do one time ya know instead of every month. Also can you share more details to the subscriptions perks? 

Thanks, what you're doing here is amazing. Its god's work and I see it coming alive by the day, slowly but surely. Have only been here for a little while and now all these unfamiliar names, units and visitors I see online are active watching. Its great that a platform like this can exist around Halo I hope you get to completing whatever it is your trying to do before inviting everyone to join. 

[Accessing]

On 7/19/2023 at 12:26 AM, Anna Richards said:

How much are you spending here to keep this forum up?

I realized I never answered this, we are at around $149/month and $1,788 total paid annually. We were able to shave off and sunset some of the applications incuring extra costs but as you can imagine its still quite high. As this is a cloud instance its possible that we could save even more money hosting it ourselves but the access to the site and uptime may be impacted since I live in Japan and our main audience is in the US and Europe. 

On 8/29/2023 at 10:58 PM, Roland said:

can you break it down?

This is something I intend to do and post soon, though its not as intricate as you might think. I am really trying to set up a notification and alert send to a Discord channel of how much money is kept in the "ONI" account. 

On 8/29/2023 at 10:58 PM, Roland said:

How can I donate without subscribing, Its just easier for me to do one time ya know instead of every month. Also can you share more details to the subscriptions perks?

There is an option in the menus under Operation, to the bottom right; Supporting ONI that leads to this URL https://www.lysithea.ai/subscriptions/! 

At the moment I do not have an option for one time donations, we have a store so 1 time donations can be transactional to a shirt or coffee mug but this store is still something to be developed.