I think our problems are caused by the 'net demon who demands bloodshed in the form of a flamewar.

Jesse, you piss me off with your cowboy hat and your peanut butter jelly time. Go suck an egg.

Goddammit, Allyson, if you weren't so busy pretending you aren't an ME exec, you would understand about the peanut butter jelly time!

Grrr.

YOU ALL SUC ANB R BIG LOOZERS

IN YOUR FACE!

SUM OF UZ AREN'T LIFING IN SIN, NEWAY!!!!!!11one

Fuck peanut butter jelly peanut butter jelly with a baseball bat.

YR ALL LOOSERS!

YEA YOU SCARDY KAT COME HERE AND SAY THT 2 MY FACE!!!1!!1!!

Don't even START with the damn peanut butter jelly.

SIN-LIVIN ROOLZ!!!

Okay so I've discussed the situation with Monique and had some talks with Steven and we have a new offer to put on the table.

We can offer you a managed, semi-dedicated account. You would get 25GB of storage, 100GB of bandwidth and 255 MySQL connections. Now, it's not cheap. It would run you $200 a month with a $100 setup fee. But it is cheaper than getting your own dedicated server. You could also offset your costs if you know people who want to switch webhosts and they open accounts with us. If five Buffistas decide to move their websites to the FG server, we would pull their space from your allocation and reduce your costs accordingly. Also, if down the road we work out the resource issues and FG needs more space for new clients, we're willing to buy back space from you, further reducing the cost.

The server would be entirely FanGeek's and we are willing to play around with the configuration and settings to see if that helps your situation. Whether or not it does, the site would stay up and there won't be any further error message issues. Also, being that it would be our server, I can reboot it any time we need that to happen.

The server would be a P4 with 512MB of RAM [if you want to do some comparison shopping]. There would be no additional fees, aside from extra storage and bandwidth should you somehow need that. All of the normal management services that a webhost provides are included in that $200 per month fee. The software, kernel and module updates are all taken care of. The backup is taken care of. Etc.

Now there are two catches to this offer. One, it's for a limited time only. A decision, yay or nay, needs to be made by noon [board time] on Friday. The second catch is that you would need to commit to a year long contract. I'm not saying you need to pay for a year upfront but you would need to agree to stay on for a year. I'd need the setup fee and the first two months in order to place the order. We could probably be up and running at the new location in two weeks or so.

I realize it's not a perfect solution and it's certainly not a cheap one but it does solve your problems without forcing you to buy and maintain your own server.

So there's our pitch. Discuss. Compare and contrast. Yadda yadda yadda.

$2400, huh? With 1000 registered members we should be able to do that fairly easily.

Hell, even 100 regular posters could come up with that pretty fast. And we already have $700 in the account, right?

The question I have is: would this solve our technical problems? Because I'd hate to sign to a year-long contract and then discover that having a dedicated server doesn't fix it.

One thing I'd like to solicit up front -- how many accounts can we switch? How much savings would we get for every five minimum-sized accounts opening?

I'd like to know the TOS for individual accounts.

I have a few, one that I may leave for the moment, and a couple I may decide to move if it helps.