So - you've probably noticed we've moved (otherwise you wouldn't be able to read this ).
We're now hosted by mxhub. We started out as a free board with phpbber.com, and then bought our own domain name (board77.net) and paid hosting with civ0.
All was fine, until civ0 was bought out by the aptly-named noeClue. It wasn't long before they started living up to their name - we experienced many, many board outages, server downtime and ridiculously slow response times. Support tickets went unanswered. The latest, sent by me over a month ago is still unanswered. Much searching on the internet revealed that all their other customers were just as dissatisfied as we were. In fact, I haven't yet succeeded in finding a single positive thing said about them.
Hence our move. We looked for hosts with good reviews, and settled upon mxhub. So far, so good - support tickets so far have always been answered within 24 hours (and believe me, I sent them a lot while setting up the new board).
Alas, we couldn't take our old domain name with us. Even though we are the rightful owners of the board77.net domain name, it was bought from phpbber, who became civ0, who became noeClue, who have no record of having any domain names registered with them. And since they never answered any of our support tickets, it was judged not worthwhile trying to get in touch with them to get our name to bring with us.
I bought our new name, board77.org from joker.com. We decided it was safer to have our domain name and web hosting with two different companies. Who knows - NoeClue or someone similar could buy out mxhub sometime in the future!
So the costs of our brand new beautiful board are:
Domain name: 12 USD per year (expires 5 Sept 2009)
Web hosting: hubOne package (see details) 14.95 USD per month, starting 24 August 2008
I took the per-month package, even though it was the most expensive, because I wanted to make sure that the move was successful before committing myself to paying for a full year in advance. Now that it is successful, I'm going to ask if we can change our account to paying by year, which would be 119.40 USD for the full year which works out to 9.95 per month - a much better deal.
As it stands now, I'm on the hook for all of this - I probably don't want to be forever, but I will at least for the first year. If you want to contribute, you can contact me for my payPal address. This is strictly voluntary - we all are in different financial situations, so please do not feel obliged to help pay for the board if doing so would cause financial hardship. As long as enough of us can pull together to raise $131.40 USD for the year (or $191.40 if they won't let us go to yearly payment) then we'll be fine.
Here's to another year of b77!
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The figures:
Domain name: 12 USD
Hosting: first month (24 Aug to 23 Sept 2008): 14.95 USD
Hosting: first year after first month (24 Sept 2008 to 23 Sept 2009): 119.40 USD
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Total: 146.35 USD
Raised so far:147.83 USD as of 28 Sept. 2008