VERY IMPORTANT DILEMMA

[Darbex]

Re: VERY IMPORTANT DILEMMA

I think a membership fee of say $1 a week or $4 a month isnt bad I dont know if that will help enough but if we keep half of the almost 1000 members that is $2,000 a month for the site. What do you HFB's think?

[Mzungu]

Re: VERY IMPORTANT DILEMMA

What I would like to do is create a finance committee. I'm not really interested in making money, but I'm not all that interested in losing money either and I just don't have the time necessary to solicit funding in any meaningful way. So, If you have what it takes and are willing to solicit sponsors and/or donations every month, please apply. I will be creating offices and promoting certain people based on their contributions to our site.

Could you explain this a little more? I think us HFBers just need a concrete goal...Tell us exactly what we need to do, and we'll probably do it!  

Is this a long-term thing, as in you are paying for the 'upgrade' now and going to collect the money over time? Or do we have 24 hours until we are doomed?

[rrocket2002]

Re: VERY IMPORTANT DILEMMA

Can HFB be setup so that one has an option to have a freebie account or a paid priviledged account equivelant to what we have now.  Freebie account would be like a guest, but able to reply to posts in the forums only and then maybe only in some of them.

You get the idea.  

Have an option for paying monthy, quarterly or yearly.

Raul

[Tiapan]

Re: VERY IMPORTANT DILEMMA

yes i was wonderin that myself.  the other thing is, i agree wit hdarbex. a small fee either monthly or yearly, sounds fine to me, and that would mean you were able to take off any account that had been inactive, or make them a guest like on marshreef. and thats a god place to judge how much does marshreef charge for membership, and maybe try asking the stores around town if they want to advertize, if we are getting so big that should draw their attention. anyway 4 dollars a month or 5 or whatever sounds acceptable to me to keep the site running, if it only takes like 2 dollars a month though i wouldnt be apposed to that either. and i want a few shirts and a hat too dang it.

[Zulaab]

Re: VERY IMPORTANT DILEMMA

Having done hosting in the past, I would imagine the biggest issue for the Houstonfishbox is bandwidth.  I don't know how much bandwidth Houstonfishbox currently consumes, but the next question in the thought of what to do next is to look at the hosting company he has today and see if there is another more viable source to move to which would offer a higher amount of bandwidth for the same cost or less.

The reason I bring up using a different hosting company is because you can see places like Apollo has just changed their bandwidth offer with their accounts... http://www.apollohosting.com/hosting/comparePlans.php#

They are showing a price of 20.96 (pre-paid 2yrs in advance) (ie ~500.00) with 3000GB of monthly transfer allowed.  I know this sounds like a lot but this is the reality of running websites that become popular.

I dont want this to be taken the wrong way etc.. its just my opinion etc, so please don't attack me for what I have written above.  I am just trying to offer different view points.

[PhishPhreek]

Re: VERY IMPORTANT DILEMMA

IMHO users fees will discourage a lot of new users and lurkers.
Having a fee for some users and not others would be difficult because you would have to offer "extras" for those that pay up.
The only thing I can see as being a good fix would be to recruit sponcers and sell advertising.....
Take a look at this site

http://www.tfhmagazine.com/

[rahne]

Re: VERY IMPORTANT DILEMMA

What issues does everyone have with Paypal......it's easy.  I can't remember the last time that I mailed a check to anyone.  Plus on Ken's end, he would have to more than likely pay for another service to accept payments and all of that which would then increase his running costs more.

I never could get it to verify my bank acct. Plus if you accidently created 2 accounts (yes I did) its just a lot easy to not use Paypal.

[Brownsnoutuk]

Re: VERY IMPORTANT DILEMMA

Paypal also charges to receive money, so your paying HFB and Paypal.

If people post logos for use on tshirts etc.. then we can all vote on then and put in an order for them. I'll pay for mine upfront so noone gets stuck with a bunch of tshirts.

[eklikewhoa]

Re: VERY IMPORTANT DILEMMA

I think the fastest easiest thing right now is donations/upgrade accounts which would pay to either upgrade or keep the site going.


Later on down the road the shirts and novelties can keep it going strong. I saw this cause to make something it takes money to make money and their's also the fact that someone has to come up with something that eceryone likes cause if not you are in a hole for stuff that doesn't sell.

[Tiapan]

Re: VERY IMPORTANT DILEMMA

yeah upgrades like higher pic upload capacity or things like that, i would pay for that. i find itinteresting that a server company wouldnt have a list of people waiting to advertise simply because a site was soo busy, u think they would be ready to encourage advertising.

[rahne]

Re: VERY IMPORTANT DILEMMA

this may be silly...but could we have a donation box at the Fall Auction?

[trademan]

Re: VERY IMPORTANT DILEMMA

Ken, how much are they trying to charge you per month? I know we have 3 dedicated servers that we run our business on and even they don't cost too badly.

I think if you would let us all know how much income the site needs we could come up w.aith a solution for you pretty quickly.

[HFBfounder]

Re: VERY IMPORTANT DILEMMA

Hi Guys, Thank you soo much for all of your ideas and thoughts and for those of you that have PM'd me and donated over the last couple of days!!

I want to say that a monthly fee is out of the question for me, because there are less painful ways to make it happen. I will be reaching out to some of you in the coming week to help us all out. I'm very encouraged by the responses. Thank you all!!

[gt3guru]

Re: VERY IMPORTANT DILEMMA

How much processor power does the site need? We have an old quad 550 2mb compaq server you could have.

If people would sign up at photobucket instead of having HFB serve the photos that may save some of bandwidth.

[eklikewhoa]

Re: VERY IMPORTANT DILEMMA

I agree with hosting pictures off-site....it works out better for everyone.