Desperate times...

...call for desperate measures.

Note: I do not know what storage methods are used.

Everyone should know by now that RSBandB needs money. There are a limited number of things to do about this.
More adds
Ask for donations/Make Pay 2 Use
Downgrade

Why don't we downgrade to a lower site space package? A while ago, I posted a topic about an auto prune of the recruitment threads. Shane said "No need to worry! We're using 230MB/160,000MB!"

That's a lot of unused space. Why don't we just lessen the maximum space? If needed we could do an auto prune of the market place and clan zone, seeing that no one uses them. Speaking of witch, the Clan Discussion forum is dead, and the Marketplace is on dieing.

I don't see any con's. Why not do it?

That's the database space. The hard drive has a total capacity of 160GB. There's no way to really downgrade the hard drive to cut costs. The way these server packages work is you downgrade everything. Auto pruning a few threads in the marketplace, recruitment etc, wouldn't be much difference. Maybe only a few MB. It's really quite silly because when you get a server they charge monthly for adding in some new hardware, like ram.

Thanks for the suggestion though.

The main problem is we were basically kicked off our old shared hosting years ago because our site is too big for shared hosting. We need a dedicated server with our own cpu, and a while ago we had to upgrade the ram because it was slowing down from using the swap file from being out of ram. We are paying for the hardware, the space and bandwidth are basically extras right now. It's the hardware that costs money on dedicated servers, not really the bandwidth, all plans come with lots by default.

The ad revenues used to pay for everything, but over the past few months earnings have slowly been going down till now the point when we don't have very much reserve money left to pay for the site. Page views have been going up, ad views have stayed basically the same, but ad revenue has been going down.

RSBandB wont be shutting down anytime soon. If we have to we'll disable signatures, the map, high scores, etc. to move down to a lower hosting plan, but I really don't want to do that. It would be great if people could help support the site in the mean time while we try out some new advertising companies.

Thanks to everyone who did donate, we made our bill for this month. I hope we can make our bill for next month... :\

I think what he meant was the site is costing more to run, more people are coming to it, the place is getting more popular but ad venue is staying the same, all these new people coming aren't helping support the site.

Not to mention the people on this site that have the nerve to block adverts, they aren't helping matters either.

Reselling isn't always allowed.

It does strike me that you need this high-end equipment to run a small site such as b&b. Why don't you downgrade and use lighthttpd instead of apache? It uses fewer resources than apache, which is what i'd assume you're using now.

I'm pretty sure Mike and Shane have already gone over all possible options and this really was as a last resort, they've never had to ask for money to run it before and they'd only ever do it if there was no other way.