When [URL=”http://www.soundforums.net/live/members/3-David-Karol”]David Karol[/URL] and [URL=”http://www.soundforums.net/live/members/4-Bennett-Prescott”]I[/URL] started this website a little over a year ago as the result of a late night conversation, we hoped it might grow to become a home for pro audio folks to hang out without feeling like their contributions only mattered in the context of banner ad revenue. We wanted to create a site for sound people, run and owned by sound people, and supported by sound people. It never occurred to us that it would grow to nearly a quarter million page views a month, with contributors from every walk of life and every part of the world, and become a viable force in the pro audio industry discussion site domain.
The fact of the matter is that it has, thanks to you. It takes a few dedicated volunteers to put together a site like this, but it takes a community to keep it going. We have that community here, a group of caring and inquisitive professionals who behave like professionals and maintain what I consider to be the highest signal to noise of any pro audio discussion site. And it’s still growing.
The proliferation and fruitfulness of this community, however, has severely taxed our low-budget web hosting plan. We have already had to move to separate servers for our database and web hosting, and then a dedicated virtual server with extra RAM for our web hosting. As you have likely experienced, these upgrades have not been enough. David and I were reticent to move away from our current host because we had stored up a large prepaid account, entirely due to the generosity of our early adopters. That account has now been depleted, so there is no longer any reason not to consider another hosting provider.
Over the course of the last few months, David has been working on a test site hosted with an alternate provider. This provider better understands our needs and, while a little more expensive, offers much more performance for our dollar. Not only that but, with the priceless help of long time SFN members [URL=”http://www.soundforums.net/live/members/430-Phil-Graham”]Phil Graham[/URL] and [URL=”http://www.soundforums.net/live/members/29-Jeffrey-Knorr”]Jeff Knorr[/URL], the new site will run much faster in less resources due to dynamic content caching and optimization using [URL=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nginx”]nginx[/URL]. The impetus for this move would have gone nowhere without these two members giving hours of their time to help David become a more expert server administrator, and without David’s continued commitment to keep the back end running while I more or less manage the public face of SFN.
Although it will cost a little more, even if donations stopped tonight we would have enough in our “war chest” to run the site for more than six months. The even better news is that the community has remained committed to our little project since the beginning, and donations have [I]not[/I] stopped. In fact, they will more than pay for the increased hosting costs at their current rate. While it is still likely that we will have minimal banner advertising in the future, it is because the community as well as many manufacturers have asked for it, not because we need it, and we will provide a method for anyone who has ever donated to opt out of seeing any banner ads at all.
The real reason I am telling this story is to explain that we plan on making the transition to our new hosting [B]this Friday evening[/B], leaving the weekend to clean up any unexpected problems. The site will be locked down, and become available once again as soon as the database can be transferred and your local DNS server updates. Hopefully it will be relatively transparent, but you guys know what’s going on, and even if there are a few hiccups I promise you based on what I’ve see on the test site it will be well worth the price.
So, from David and Phil and Jeff and I, thanks for sticking with us… and it’s going to be an even better 2012!
