CMP Forum down again

[Badger]

Well, hold on folks …

Before I go further, let me declare something up front. I don't use CMP, but only because my collecting focus is either German K98k mausers, or helping my wife with her Enfield collection, so we're personally not U.S. milsurp collectors and therefore don't have a lot of requirement to use the CMP boards.

Having said that, I don't think it's fair to be too critical of any site, which I assume everyone uses for absolutley free?

Let me reiterate something. Although our own Military Surplus Collectors Forums are FREE to everyone interested in these old milsurp firearms, it costs between $10,000 - $15,000 per year to program, operate the dedicated hardware and software, as well as maintain the high performance bandwidth needed to give all our members a first class web site experience. The result is a site performance as shown in the attached pic, which is the monthly report we receive from an external service which monitors our site every five minutes for performance and up-time, accessing and checking our availability from almost every major city in the world.

Our operating costs are growing annually, but our revenues to balance the books are not. Last year particularly, was a time of extra costs over and above the norm. We had to migrate to a new and more powerful computer server to host the site, which provides far superior performance under load and higher storage capacity for all of the membership for many years to come. In addition, we provided a temporary home for Dick and Gloria Culver's CSP community between March and August of 2009, spearheading a fundraising campaign to help them get back on their feet and re-open a new site, into which we personally contributed over $1,500 of the almost $8,000 generously donated by many of your folks, which was forwarded to the Culvers.

Even huge gun sites such as Gunboards, who do receive large sums of money from formal sponsorships by gun related businesses, are indicating they are experiencing problems maintaining their sites. Vic, who owns Gunboards, recently posted a personal plea for donations from users, indicating that they were experiencing a 20-30% operating deficit, in spite of large amounts of revenue from their formal commercial sponsorships. He implied that if things didn't improve in his cost versus revenue model, he may be forced to take other measures. Since we highly value Gunboards and Vic's contributions to our collector community, we personally sent him $50 to become a "Gold Bullet Member".

So, to make a long story short, we personally pay for the lion's share of the costs, subsidized by about one hundred Contributing Members (out of 13,000+ Registered Members), each of whom donate, what works out to be on average, of about six cents per day to help us out. We sincerely thank those folks for their generosity. Unlike Gunboards, we receive NO commercial sponsorships or advertising revenue and the various web site banners you see on our site advertising gun related information and businesses, have all been placed there by us for FREE. They are shown purely for the benefit of helping our members find other good sources of Internet information besides here, plus to recommend gun related businesses which provide outstanding products and/or services to our community. We have no other sources of revenue to offset the operating costs mentioned, except an eBay affiliate relationship, where we earn revenue if members post links to eBay auctions and other members click on those links to look at the auction referred to.

I have no idea why CMP is experiencing so many problems with their servers, but subject to verifying it, I suspect it might be due to using a shared server to keep operating costs low, where other customers with their own bulletin board forums use the same hardware and operating system platform.

What I can tell you about the CMP forums is the following, which is publicly available information:

Their server is powered by Microsoft-IIS/6.0 webserver software and is located in Port Clinton in United States. The servers are hosted by:

Admin Name: Michael Christiansen
Admin Organization: Cros.net, Inc.
Admin Street1: 125B Maple Street
Admin City: Port Clinton
Admin State/Province: OH
Admin Postal Code: 43452
Admin Country: US
Admin Phone: +1.4197346037
Site IP address: 216.206.238.58
Server Type: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
Server OS: Windows [ Windows ]
Web Server: Microsoft-IIS [ Microsoft-IIS ]
ISP: Qwest Communications

In the last three months their Internet ranking, visits and views statistics have all been decreasing, or down about 6%, which may be due to the summer when people spend more of their time outdoors and not on their computers. According to published stats, their server platform supports about 5,000 monthly visits with 18,000 page views. For comparison, which you can view in real time at the bottom of our own forum main home page, we get average visits of about 250,000 monthly with about 3,000 to 4,000 guest visitors per day.

To be honest and in my opinion only, the Microsoft platform for hosting boards (particularly shared boards) is not the best choice for reliability, stability and performance. We use a dedicated (just our site on it) Linux platform (essentially Unix) which again, in my opinion, it is vastly superior and more robust as a server platform, however, it is also far more expensive to operate and requires greater technical expertise (Unix) to tune and maintain.

I do recognize that there lots of folks out there who feel some huge sense of entitlement to use every resource on the Internet for free and expect it to be available when they demand it, however, if you guys really want high performance and reliability out of the CMP platforms, someone is going to have to pay for it and that's where the discussion starts and ends. Personally, I never complain about anything that's free, but that's just me.

Finally, remember, the cost of operating the server hardware, software and bandwidth to access it, is only part of the overall costs. In addition to those direct costs, with the help of our excellent moderating staff, I personally spent dozens of hours on-line (averaging about three hours per day), answering emails, trying to help educate a lot of elderly gun owners register or use the bulletin board software interface.

Hope this helps bring some perspective to the issue.

Regards,
Doug (Badger)