cologunmarket down?

[palepainter]

I run a huge data base website, and can tell you that it is kind of funny that the amount of money it takes to handle bandwidth is so minimal. I'm kind of shocked at the number of times asked to give to RMGO, that they can not make the website a priority of investment of the supporter's funds.

[Driftwood]

I run a huge data base website, and can tell you that it is kind of funny that the amount of money it takes to handle bandwidth is so minimal. I'm kind of shocked at the number of times asked to give to RMGO, that they can not make the website a priority of investment of the supporter's funds.

I feel the same way.

I've been a RMGO member for 3 years and have always kind of expected that part of my dues went towards the site maintenance. And now Dudley wants more money (sort of like those NAGR emails I get 2-3 times a week). Gee, that's great, so many of us are made out of money.

Honestly, if ColoGunMarket truly does cost that much to maintain then just pull it down.

[Hoosier]

I run a huge data base website, and can tell you that it is kind of funny that the amount of money it takes to handle bandwidth is so minimal. I'm kind of shocked at the number of times asked to give to RMGO, that they can not make the website a priority of investment of the supporter's funds.

Running websites is insanely cheap now days. Like, laughably cheap. I'd like to see their bandwidth numbers, but unless they're pushing thousands of GB in xfer each month there's no reason they should be paying more than $100 a month in hosting. I use to push 20Mbit/sec in the late 90's when bandwidth was expensive and servers were slow. Today you can just provision a new instance and have it online in minutes. I'm about to upsize a database instance because the 360mb of ram it has is no longer enough... to push 600Gb/month.

[palepainter]

Running websites is insanely cheap now days. Like, laughably cheap. I'd like to see their bandwidth numbers, but unless they're pushing thousands of GB in xfer each month there's no reason they should be paying more than $100 a month in hosting. I use to push 20Mbit/sec in the late 90's when bandwidth was expensive and servers were slow. Today you can just provision a new instance and have it online in minutes. I'm about to upsize a database instance because the 360mb of ram it has is no longer enough... to push 600Gb/month.

Xactly,
I cant even remember if the RMGO website hosts images or if that is external, photobucket, etc..,. In which case, bandwidth usage on text? Please people.

[sniper7]

maybe you guys could offer to help him out with it? he said in one of the emails they had to hire somebody because of it?

I always figured my yearly dues helped with the site. It seems to me a lot more info goes on this website than ever on cologunmarket, even with RMGO site added in there.

[Hoosier]

maybe you guys could offer to help him out with it? he said in one of the emails they had to hire somebody because of it?

I always figured my yearly dues helped with the site. It seems to me a lot more info goes on this website than ever on cologunmarket, even with RMGO site added in there.

When they said they had to hire someone, my assumption was that's just a normal non-tech person who's policing the forums, banning spammers and the like. There is zero need to have someone work on a message board full time, unless you're massive. I can't see a membership only forum related to colorado gun owners pushing that kind of traffic.

[RMGOdirector]

RMGO owns/runs/maintains a dozen websites, and we share server space with nationalgunrights.org. The activity on all these sites have been very high, and increasing each month, so we've been ratcheting up our capacity.

We got caught with our trousers down when bandwidth climbed beyond expectations. We even had to move the NAGR site to it's own server.

But please understand this: ColoGunMarket.com is not our main mission. In fact, it's a fringe benefit of membership to RMGO.

When we said we hired another person, the CGM workload was only part of the reason. But manually checking each registrant to see if they are RMGO members takes time. And then there's the daily "I can't find my username" or "Something isn't working". That takes up a LOT of time (of course, often those requests come during the weekend, or at 1am).

To date, we have not done a comprehensive purge of CGM users who donated once but failed to maintain their RMGO membership. That's going to change soon.

All of this being said, CGM is now taken care of for a number of years. Our members responded well to the appeal.

We don't expect members/supporters to donate every time we ask. But if you've ever been involved in the very difficult process of maintaining the stability of a non-profit, you'll understand why that non-profit gives it's supporters many opportunities to donate.

[Hoosier]

For what it's worth, Dudley, if you're a Not For Profit you can outsource your email hosting to Google for free.

[palepainter]

Thanks for your response Dudley! I would also suggest in order to keep bandwidth a non issue, to have external hosting for all imagery. I think that people involved with advertising their stuff for sale on your site would be willing to comply. Most sites I have been to operate that way to keep bandwidth down as well. I personally am not bothered by having to upload images to a server and then having the image linked to it.

Regardless of the quirks with the COLOGUNMARKET website, I appreciate your awareness and information passed on to my family. Thank you for the efforts you give to the state of Colorado.

[RMGOdirector]

Appreciate the input. If this were a political issue, it wouldn't be an issue. But since this is a strictly technical area, I'm left to the advice of others.

For a number of security reasons, we wanted all sites on the same server. We've had RMGO.org at the same server since we started the group, 14 years ago. Changing the host server is, honestly, so much of a headache that it simply isn't an option.

In terms of technical help, however, we are looking for expertise in an area:


New web page implementation – We have the artwork done, but we need help getting it up on the server and testing it. Though we’d rather do this through a volunteer, realistically we might have to hire this out (or comp a Life Membership).

If you know of someone who can help in either area, please have them call my office. 970-482-7646