I guess I'm a typical long time member hiding in the shadows. In the beginning I logged in frequently to download manuals and browse the albums. I've not started any serious wrenching until last summer so today I mostly visit as a guest to read and learn and have found answers in the existing posts. To me this site gives great inspiration and I find the discussions invaluable to avoid rookie mistakes.
Living in the north of Sweden I'm pretty much on my own with my M38. And this site is by far the best place to go for information. Thank you all for contributing with hard work, information, inspiration, and entertainment.
I would appreciate if the decision is to keep running the site in some way. But I don't think it's OK that a few people should bear the cost for something we all use. I would actually feel better to pay a fee for access. But I realize the problem is more to find someone who can run the site and I fully understand if you have to close down.
Greetings from Umea, Sweden _________________ Per L
M38 1-52
* A multilevel donor support structure starting at $15/year with perks for members at the $50/$100 level & up worked for another hobby site.
* $15/year for a hobby that runs $10k-$20k per vehicle is chump change.
* I saved a lot of money on my project when I started studying your site before buying the wrong stuff.
* The FB groups look more social than a data resource but they do seem to have large ‘support staffs’. Maybe the moderators on those FB jeep sites could be approached directly with an invitation to help run a well established site.
* Willysmjeeps.com has so much information in the albums, downloads and threads that it took me a while to realize I was swimming in an ocean, not a pond.
* Piggybacking the site with an established vendor is a great idea.
* Your free pdf scans are fantastic but should not be considered in direct competition with a vendor’s high end bound hard copies/CD’s.
* Lurkers are everywhere. Anyone with a M38/M38A1 or just likes war jeeps has probably been to your site and is a potential paying member. _________________ Don Alvarez
Retired HS Teacher
Central Florida
M38 Project
Joined: May 12, 2018 Posts: 93 Location: Austin Texas
Posted: Tue Mar 30, 2021 11:21 pm Post subject:
Sorry for being late to the show...
As for $600 a year. That seems a lot considering this site likely has a very low bandwidth. Shared accounts on many Web hosts are just $3.00 a month and that includes a fair amount of disk and bandwidth. Are you using a CPANEL interface to manage the data base and email? Check out HostGator as they have simple plans and it will not break the bank.
BTW - I have run a hobby based web site for close to 25 yars now. I used to pay $600 + every year but now my expenses are a lot lower. That is on a Virtual Private Server (VPS) Cloud machine and not just a shared system. I bet you qualify for use of a shared system with how little traffic this site attracts. It should easily be under $5.00 a month. Don't fall for the WebHost BS that you require multiple CPU's and a dedicated machine!
Many plans include an SSL certificate as well so you can encrypt the site with https.
Send me a PM and I can go into detail what you can look for. It's not as difficult to move as you think. You setup the SQL Server fro the database, Install the latest PHPBBB software and then you migrate the database over. You can pay to have that all done but really it's not difficult. Just requires some planning and good documentation.
I sent you an email. Those are some interesting ideas worth looking into. I did talk to John Bizal at Midwest Military yesterday and his web hosting consultants said it would take $10K to update and migrate everything over to their preferred program wordpress.
If we could get things down in cost to $5 per month like it used to be years ago that would be a big help. The next hurdle is finding some people to help run the website.
The time commitment to go through membership requests and monitor message traffic on the forums is not near as much as it used to be but it is still time to monitor and maintain the website.
First lets see how viable an upgrade and change of server company would be then we will get to the next problem of maintaining the site. _________________ Ryan Miller
MVPA # 22010
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