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.

I might be able to move a couple -- I'll have to check.

Yeah, I'm sure we *could* raise that much money. Can we figure out by Friday noon if it'll allow us to solve the connections issue?

I might have an individual one to add as well, though it's not fan related. Would than be a hindrance?

On a semi-dedicated server we won't have issues with a limit to the number of connections. The only issue will be if the server has enough horsepower to handle Phoenix while still providing acceptable quality of service to any other customers hosted on that server.

I think the system described can support Buffistas, with proper tuning. I wouldn't want to have to guarantee that it will enough extra horsepower to support anyone else.

For comparison, Dreamhost offers a totally dedicated server for $200 a month, if paid yearly, and no setup fee. They give less memory, a little more disk space and only 3/4 of the monthly bandwidth offered by FanGeek.

Okay, here's how it works. These are our hosting plans. If you get someone to buy an Economy package, I would discount your account by $10 per month and remove 200 MB from your storage allocation. You can sign up as many accounts as you want as long as you keep enough space and bandwidth in your Buffista account to actually run the board. You get to decide what that number is.

Our Terms of Service are the same for all accounts. However, I don't think I'll be agreeing to take on any other message forums, especially ones that run off MySQL databases. Sites that use PHP and MySQL should be fine but we might want to discuss that before we say yes.

As for will this solve our issues, the answer is yes. Right now, you have a piece of the MySQL resource pie. Under this new system, you'd have the whole pie. Monique and I don't run sites that use it. That could change down the road, if we resolve these connection issues in a satisfactory manner, but that would be pretty far down the road. And again, we wouldn't even consider it unless we knew that the connections issue was a thing of the past.

The server we'd running on is not as powerful as the one we're on but more powerful than the one we were on before this. Also, there would fewer sites to deal with. Right now, we manage 9 other sites. You're the most popular, followed by NickBrendon.com.

Servepath is a dedicated server package I've had recommended to me "If you don't need much tech help."

40 GB hard drive, 100 GB bandwidth, if I'm reading the descriptions correctly, and they only do dedicated servers; starting at $89 a month. I don't see anything about MySQL, but I'm at the edge of my knowledge right now, so I'll let y'all discuss specifics.

ETA: also, there is no contract with them. Even on the annual package. 30 days notice to change plans.

I also have a friend who was very happy with Dreamhost as the host of her site, but I do not believe she had a dedicated server as she didn't run a msg board or other resource heavy feature.