We would already owe them money, 233.85 GB and almost a week to go. Doing 6.5 gb per day roughly so that would be about 45 Gigs more before the end of the month. The site will only continue to get more popular with the recent addition of the news content. I project traffic will triple in the next year or so.
Already this month we have had 212,352 unique visitors, accounting for 5,672,932 pageviews, and 24,683,519 hits. Bandwidth transfer is at 234.03 GB (notice it's already gone up). At our slowest time of the day we are doing 6.30mbps average bandwidth transfer.
If there is a problem I have to rely on their staff to deal with it, instead of being able to handle it myself. Last Enterprise ISP I hosted with it was $350 per hour 2 hour minimum to get access to a server after hours or on weekends. I have 24x7 access to it where I am. We are fine.
Most Enterprise ISP's limit you to just 1gb per database table, and we can't do that. We are using 3.13gb counting just our main databases. The posts on the forum is using 2.1gb by its self.
Then you have shared servers which seem fine until you get put on a server with a high load site like ours.
This site got it's start all the way back in 1995 when another popular transgender site was forced to take down their chat due to their provider telling them they were using too much bandwidth. No one can tell me anything like that. I can use my connection full out 24x7x365 without having to worry about bandwidth overages.
Where I am at I can go from 25mbps all the way up to gigabyte level if needed. which we might in another 10-15 years. I can upgrade bandwidth here with a phone call and a slightly larger monthly bandwidth expense.
Then you have the fact that what is given can be easily taken away at any time if they don't like you or something you are doing.
If they wish to donate the costs of the hosting to the site each month, or provide us with newer hardware, I would consider something like that. But I will not be moving the server.
Any proposals or sponsorships you want to send, be sure to do it via forum pm or email.
