Scooby is a reseller, when we talk about the 'host' being bad, it's the people that Scooby rent's space off's fault.
I pay £18 a month for the rental of this VPS, and Scooby pays that to the reseller of the VPS, basically. (Think of it like a food chain... Server - 5 or more VPS's - we rent 1 of those VPS's.)
The first crash was a terrible host that just didn't communicate, and didn't tell me that the .com domain was expiring, so i didnt get a chance to renew it. Then i moved to Scooby (after meeting him at college) and that move lost most of the pictures as you know. Then when things were sounds with Scooby, i realised that space on the server was becoming very short because everybody was uploading ridiculously sized images. So i limited it, and that caused another great cafafle. Then, the more recent crash - was when the reseller that Scooby used kicked me off (through him) because we were using too much resources up on the "shared server". So Scobby instead moved to reselling VPS's, and we now rent one of them.
Now although the VPS is more expensive, it has more space and more bandwidth - and we dont need to worry about getting kicked off for using too much of the servers resources because a VPS acts like a whole server, so we have to manage and maintain the forum to not exceed the limitations of the resources on the server that are allocated to our VPS.
The donations and advert go towards the £18 a month, plus about a further £10 or so a year for the domain. (That's around £226 a year).
Hopefully that answers the questions regarding the cost and crashes.
(p.s. Rob, this is not a hosting issue, this is a good thing because it means people can upload larger images).
too much down time and too many .com,.co.cc,.co.uk changes and too many excusses about the hosting site being over run buy picture size, chat ect. ect.
Excusses ? We state the facts, nothing more - nothing less. If you choose to think of those as us making excuses, then keep it to yourself, because frankly I don't want to hear it.
