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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Business, Finance, and Careers > BFC Fixes SA
 
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Notorious b.s.d.
Jan 25, 2003

by Reene

No Butt Stuff posted:

Do we have a forum that has a poo poo load of traffic (like fyad) and no actual cash (like bfc)? Because that's a great forum to delete to save on bandwidth/servers while keeping cash flow the same.

Most of the costs associated with SA are essentially fixed costs, largely unconnected to the amount of traffic:
  • They own and operate their own hardware, so they don't scale hosting costs with traffic.

  • Software maintenance is an un-ending and expensive pain in the rear end, because SA is a 15-year-old, heavily customized PHP application. This will not change with fewer users.

  • Roughly $20k was spent on the serious outage in 2015. Paying for professional help on an emergency basis is never cheap, and future failures are no less likely. This cost also doesn't scale with the userbase. (Notably, I believe the forums depend on MyISAM, rather than a modern MySQL backend. That's a bad and dangerous configuration. And almost impossible to fix.)

All the easy costs have already been eliminated. SA has no permanent staff and no office. I think Lowtax lives in a cardboard box somewhere.

Running a business is not like your personal finances. Sometimes you really have no choice but to focus on the top line. SA needs more users and revenue, to make better use of the existing capital assets.

Notorious b.s.d. fucked around with this message at 23:53 on Oct 2, 2015

* # ¿ Oct 2, 2015 23:50
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# ¿ May 10, 2024 01:54
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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Business, Finance, and Careers > BFC Fixes SA