The future of the forum:

[b1k3rdude]

This forum was founded in 2001 (internet archive), and has been an invaluable source of information and help for over 24years and during this time the forum has always been free for anyone to join and participate. 

Following on from Mel's post, as it stands one person is paying out of pocket for the hosting and domain renewal, but that person is retiring from the role. I/we would like to try and keep the forum online and avoid all of the incredibly invaluable information contained within this forum being lost. So off the top of my head we have following options - 

- Someone else takes over the hosting and domain costs in its entirety.
- I/we setup some kind of crowd donation page and ask for donations, over-donations would simply be saved for the following years costs etc.
- Or I try and figure out how to migrate the entire forum to a Raspberry pi or Mini Pc, and cover the cost of the domain name myself. 

The annual hosting and domain name cost, is about the same a pair of tyres. Most of that is the hosting cost, which can probably be reduced, if I can figure out how to safely reduce the amount of space the forum is using.

I'm a computer engineer in my day job, but I know very little Linux. MyBB, hosting and domain forwarding would all be an almost vertical learning curve for me. And that's before I even look at the feasibility of doing a migration from online to local hosting.

[Grahamm]

My business is hosted on NamesCo and I have WePanel Premium (see https://www.names.co.uk/wepanel-hosting )

I wouldn't be able to maintain the site, but I think that might be OK for hosting.

[fazersharp]

I would be willing to chip in some money. So how much is needed to be raised each year.

[b1k3rdude]

My business is hosted on NamesCo and I have WePanel Premium (see https://www.names.co.uk/wepanel-hosting )

I wouldn't be able to maintain the site, but I think that might be OK for hosting.

We will have to have a PM chat and see how that would work.

[b1k3rdude]

I would be willing to chip in some money. So how much is needed to be raised each year.

I mentioned the amount in the OP, but the actual amount is currently £260 p/y. £240 for the hosting and £20 for the domain name registration..

Buy as I mentioned, if I can get the foot print down the hosts costs should go down with it.

[fazersharp]

I would be willing to chip in some money. So how much is needed to be raised each year.

I mentioned the amount in the OP, but the actual amount is currently £260 p/y. £240 for the hosting and £20 for the domain name registration..

Buy as I mentioned, if I can get the foot print down the hosts costs should go down with it.

Are any of theses any good
https://www.ionos.co.uk/hosting/web-hosting

Going forward would a "by us a coffee" thing work- if you have found some help on here. I dont know how you set them up and then also as you say a fund page of some sort.

[BBROWN1664]

Are any of theses any good
https://www.ionos.co.uk/hosting/web-hosting

the pain of moving to save £0 a month is not something i think is worth it unless they provide something more than. We would need their business package at the moment which is exactly the same price as we currently pay £16+VAT

[unfazed]

I mentioned the amount in the OP, but the actual amount is currently £260 p/y. £240 for the hosting and £20 for the domain name registration..

Buy as I mentioned, if I can get the foot print down the hosts costs should go down with it

I will give half the cost tomorrow after I get out of hospital, I will message you with my private email address shortly to arrange the payment.  It is not right to have one person paying the full amount, I had not realised that only one person is funding the lot. i have made a few good friends from this site over the years. I was on the original forum in 20003,  but lost access when it changed and had to rejoin in 2011. I had uploaded a lot of information and manuals, but must the lost in the last change. I managed to upload some again but appear to have lost that facility for some reason and be been unable to re upload anything recently.

[fazersharp]

Th

I mentioned the amount in the OP, but the actual amount is currently £260 p/y. £240 for the hosting and £20 for the domain name registration..

Buy as I mentioned, if I can get the foot print down the hosts costs should go down with it

I will give half the cost tomorrow after I get out of hospital, I will message you with my private email address shortly to arrange the payment.  It is not right to have one person paying the full amount, I had not realised that only one person is funding the lot. i have made a few good friends from this site over the years. I was on the original forum in 20003,  but lost access when it changed and had to rejoin in 2011. I had uploaded a lot of information and manuals, but must the lost in the last change. I managed to upload some again but appear to have lost that facility for some reason and be been unable to re upload anything recently.

That is amazing, I was just thinking if enough people can put £10 in a go fund or whatever it is then that would do it.

I see about the cost issue with moving for 0 benefit but does it need to be a business hosting. As no trade is done, and how about advertising on here.

[b1k3rdude]

Going forward would a "by us a coffee" thing work

What ever we setup, it will have to non-profit and accurate record kept. If I/we can do it without having to setup a bank account, that would be preferable, but already run an NGO so its no big deal if we have to go down this route.

[BBROWN1664]

I see about the cost issue with moving for 0 benefit but does it need to be a business hosting. As no trade is done, and how about advertising on here.

We only need the package due to the amount of storage we need at the moment. If someone has time to take over and manage the site properly then we could reduce the required storage by consolidating images etc etc but I dont have the time or the skills to do that.
As for adverts, the person that founded the site said no adverts and thats something we have stuck with. We did get an offer to sell the site last year but we turned it down as it would have meant adverts on the site and/or membership fees,

[Slaninar]

Our local motorcycling forum was preserved by removing the localy hosted pictures.
A drastic cut, but with zero budget, it was an option.

I use & recommend Porkbun for domain registration without spending more than necessary (if I got it right, renewal for a co.uk domain is around $6 per year there).
https://io.bikegremlin.com/15824/porkbun-review/

For hosting, how much storage space are we talking about?
Huge amount of storage does increase costs - for hosting, and for regular backups too.
But what size are we talking about?

Google AdSense can be used to cover the costs by adding some adverts.
Not ideal, but it works more reliably than relying on donations.

This should be preserved.

[b1k3rdude]

• Our local motorcycling forum was preserved by removing the localy hosted pictures. A drastic cut, but with zero budget, it was an option.
  
• I use & recommend Porkbun for domain registration without spending more than necessary (if I got it right, renewal for a co.uk domain is around $6 per year there). https://io.bikegremlin.com/15824/porkbun-review/
  
• For hosting, how much storage space are we talking about?
  
• Google AdSense can be used to cover the costs by adding some adverts.Not ideal, but it works more reliably than relying on donations.
  

• Too drastic imho, regarding images, removing duplicates should help.
  
• Will keep this in mind.
  
• atm 50gb, but a lot of that is backups and the old forum. So I need to make local backups before attempting to nuke anything.
  
• I would rather stab myself with a fork, I despise google and ads in general.
  

[Grahamm]

Regarding images, two options come to mind:

1) Pics of "here's my bike" that aren't related to maintenance issues could be removed

2) If all the images can be downloaded (in sections if needed) it's possible to use a batch processor to resize them and then "save for web" (Photoshop or equivalent) which reduces the number of colours and compresses them to a much smaller size with no real loss of quality.

[fazersharp]

Yes I agree with heres my bike photos but what about also compleatly deleting sections such as
Diesels and Lawnmowers
Introduction
For Sale & Wanted
The Laboratory !
MT Models - MT07 / 09 (Tracer) & MT10
Whoever posts last is best

Word Association contains 11,535 replies and nothing to do with the bike same as
Three word story
The FOC-U Bike Picture Challenge probable contains an enormous amount of photos that no one would miss and gos back to 2014 with one in most years
Actually looking there are loads of threads that could go like caption competition so anything that is not about the bike.

[Slaninar]

• Our local motorcycling forum was preserved by removing the localy hosted pictures. A drastic cut, but with zero budget, it was an option.
  
• I use & recommend Porkbun for domain registration without spending more than necessary (if I got it right, renewal for a co.uk domain is around $6 per year there). https://io.bikegremlin.com/15824/porkbun-review/
  
• For hosting, how much storage space are we talking about?
  
• Google AdSense can be used to cover the costs by adding some adverts.Not ideal, but it works more reliably than relying on donations.
  

• Too drastic imho, regarding images, removing duplicates should help.
  
• Will keep this in mind.
  
• atm 50gb, but a lot of that is backups and the old forum. So I need to make local backups before attempting to nuke anything.
  
• I would rather stab myself with a fork, I despise google and ads in general.
  

Here are some practical ideas, numbered for easier discussion:

1) Removing images
Digression part
I did it as a radical ("Solomon's") solution for hosting our forum for undetermined_time_in_the_future at my own cost with zero ads or member funding.
In hindsight, I am not 100% sure if it was the right (or the wrong, for that matter) call.
Forum was in a technical mess at the time, so it was not easy to try and just compress/"optimize" images or see to remove the less important ones (though I'm not sure I could make the call which member galleries are worth, and which aren't worth keeping, with countless inactive members etc.).

Back to the point: if images can be optimized/compressed, you could save a lot of space without removing them and that could be the best way to go.

2) Storage space
This is what I do (no more honest recommendation than that):

Offload the non-direct-forum stuff to other services. Hosting server storage is premium in terms of price and performance. Makes no sense to use it for storing backups, emails or similar (I often see people storing emails on their web-hosting server and that's why I brought it up - not claiming it is the case here).

2a) Backups
Hetzner Storage Box (my article explaining the details and setup) for automated backups (and a local HDD copy as an extra precaution). It's practical, stable, secure, cheap, and reliable. 
$4 per month, for 1 TB of storage.

2b) E-mails
MXroute is great for emails - they are still selling lifetime packages (one-time-payment - mine, from 2018, has served me well and is still running fine, not a fly-by-night operation).  Cheap, secure, stable, reliable delivery. Offload emails from the forum's hosting server (and make your backups and migrations simpler). Why separate email service is a good idea.
$200 one-time-payment now - so not too cheap, but time flies.
If money is really tight, I suppose I could donate an account from my own MXroute reseller service (hoping that route doesn't bite me).

2c) Images
It is pointlessly complicated to offload forum images, but I suppose they could be optimized (compression, perhaps even size reduction).

3) Adverts
Can't please everyone - the alternative is for members/users to cover all the costs (I run my forum and sites so they work fine with an ad blocker enabled, along with a ko-fi one-time donation and Patreon monthly donation option - along with ads for folks who don't mind them). 
Each option has its pros and cons (and no good deed goes unpunished  ).

4) Cloudflare
Much like Google, a big brother that gives a lot of stuff for free and smiles warmly upon us (before stabbing us in the back). For now, it is a great help, and I use it regularly (but keep DNS setup export/backup so that I can run without it if needed). It does reduce server load to a great degree by stopping bots (and to a lesser degree by providing some caching).
It also makes setup and migration a lot faster and simpler (faster DNS propagation to name one advantage).
The bottom line is that even the free tier can cut costs (CPU, RAM, and especially bandwidth).
My Cloudflare privacy concern - fair to note.

5) Hosting 
In terms of hosting, I use some high-end reseller hosting, but I pay a premium price for storage, so that would not be a good option to host the forum (would be even more expensive than it already costs). 
High-quality shared hosting, on the other hand, could do the job, but probably not lower than what is already being paid - and since forum runs fine and I haven't noticed any downtime, I suppose the current hosting provider is good (ukhost4u from what I could tell).

I would recommend switching domain registration away from the hosting provider - that's usually a good precaution and idea.
Trying to switch domain registration also confirms that you trully own the domain (i.e. that it's not actually registered to your hosting provider) - that's best sorted out while you're on good terms and have a working hosting service you're paying for.

I would also recommend paying for domain registration for more than one year in advance. Never rely on auto-renewal, not for the domain, since it gets quite complicated when domain registration runs out for whatever reason.

Relja BrevityIsNotMyVirtue Novović

[b1k3rdude]

2) If all the images can be downloaded (in sections if needed) it's possible to use a batch processor to resize them and then "save for web" (Photoshop or equivalent) which reduces the number of colours and compresses them to a much smaller size with no real loss of quality.

Thats not a bad idea, if the images are all sorted in one location, then re-upload would then be possible.

[b1k3rdude]

Here are some practical ideas, numbered for easier discussion:
1) Removing images
if images can be optimized/compressed, you could save a lot of space without removing them and that could be the best way to go. It is pointlessly complicated to offload forum images.
2) Storage space
Makes no sense to use it for storing backups, emails or similar.
3) E-mails
MXroute is great for emails. 
4) Adverts
Can't please everyone - the alternative is a ko-fi one-time donation and Patreon monthly donation option - 
5) Cloudflare
Much like Google, a big brother that gives a lot of stuff for free and smiles warmly upon us (before stabbing us in the back). 
6) Hosting 
In terms of hosting, ukhost4u 
7) Domain reg  I would also recommend paying for domain registration for more than one year in advance. Never rely on auto-renewal, not for the domain.

1. yep, gonna look at doing a mass resize to.jpg
   
2. yep, going to copy all backups locally and then remove all but the most recent.
   
3. We do hold or process emails.
   
4. As already mentioned the original ethos of this site was NO adverts.
   
5. I dont know how or why we would want to use this.
   
6. thanks for the info, I will see who the current provider is etc and see how they compare.
   
7. good point, will check.
   

@Slaninar, I will drop you  a PM, so as not to clutter up this thread.

1.  

[b1k3rdude]

Evening

So I have asked two other people to become a second named person on the bank account that I would need to pay the donations into and hosting fees out of, and all I got were reasons why they can't do it. When the only thing that is required is be a name on the account, I would be DOING all the fucking work, administering the account and the forum, but what ever.

As I mentioned in the OP, Bob has paying out of his own pocket all this time. But I am not in a financial position to pay for the upkeep of the forum, nor WTF should I. The lack of responses bar one person (Unfazed, thank you fella) for actual help (I don't mean advice), is quite frankly fucking disappointing.

So let put this PLAINLY - unless someone is willing to be step up and be the second name on the bank account, then when the hosting fee's run out at the end of October, the forum will CEASE to exist after that time. And all the info contained there in will only partially exist on the internet Archive in ready only format.

b.

[unfazed]

Unfortunately, I doubt if they would except an Irish resident on it, but you can ask.