I wish lowering the site costs was as simple as moving hosts or moving to shared hosting system. There are several reasons the website has stayed where it is.
I own a cage in a datacenter and offer dedicated servers, vps as well as shared hosting. The problem with this site is it needs to be on an isolated system due to it running ancient software. It is currently in my cage on its own isolated hardware with a management panel called cpanel (so it is easily managed for email and other functions by the admins etc). Cpanel in itself has crept up from being $9.99/mo to $27.99/mo on its own. There is no charge for the hardware it uses, the remaining ~$95/mo goes to the power costs of the server.
Running on such old software (such as php 5.6 + vbulletin 4.0.8) comes with a plethora of issues. Mainly being that security fixes and support for php 5.6 and vbulletin 4.x stopped over 4 years ago. Multiple times a year (as needed), myself or one of my employees must manually make custom patches to our php 5.6 to harden it and stop new found exploits and bugs. Without these fixes the site and its data would not survive. The site has been taken down a few times over the past years due to automated attacks which took advantage of bugs or exploits in the older software. Keeping it up to date and fighting the attacks is a necessary but never ending battle.
There are multiple companies which can offer shared hosting including myself for much cheaper but those options all run the latest versions of software, are on hosting which is shared with potentially hundreds of other sites and do not include custom management such as is provided with TDT. We provide these services at no charge because of who Randall Flagg is to me.
We have attempted to upgrade to the latest vbulletin in the past to avoid these pitfalls but unfortunately 90% of the addons and mods on this site have been discontinued and are not supported by the latest version of vbulletin. They would each have to be custom made for the new software and later versions of php. Due to the heavy modifications to the boards and addons needed for the current functions, the current content could not be transfered properly to the later versions of vbulletin. We purchased vbulletin 5.x and tried ourselves. We also paid vbulletin for their support to complete the upgrade and were told it cannot be done in its current state.
Being hosted in our cage also provides us with additional benefits such as direct access to our hardware and the ability to have onsite as well as offsite backups over dark fiber to an offsite location. Backups are kept 60 days and total over 400GB alone for onsite and another 400GB for offsite, just for 2 months of data. Each backup of the site and database is approximately 6.5GB of space per day.
Our current options are:
A) Continue with the status quo, which works and is stable
B) Start over fresh with vbulletin 5.x losing most of the quality of life addons we currently use. This would allow being moved back to shared hosting around $20-30/month but you would be starting over completely.
C) Someone else takes over hosting and manual management who understands how to make and apply/compile custom patches to the latest exploits/hacks at no cost (10-20 hours a year of labor) + the cost of who ever is hosting it.
Other providers managed hosting includes updating to the latest and greatest software to prevent and block exploits and hacks, not creating custom code to fix ancient software which has reached EOL (end of life) years ago. I doubt we can find any other provider willing to do custom work such as what is being done now for less than several hundreds of dollars per incident or even per hour.
Originally Posted by Michael
