Why does it cost so much to run a forum

[falisrm]

i received an email yesturday and the forum is seriously in the red. I just started here and i was interested in using it. I don’t think it will be around very long. How sad.

Here is part of the email
"That’s because we host, manage, and staff this site EVERY DAY of the month. And every month it costs over $10,000 to run Catholic Answers Forums.

But the site does not yet pay for itself. In fact Catholic Answers Forums runs a deficit of nearly $6,000 every month."

 

[lizaanne]

I’ve wondered this myself, but I doubt they are going to discuss their financial details on the open forum.

You might have better luck PMing a mod maybe.

~Liza

 

[Geocacher]

Traffic, Hackers, Forum spamming, moderation, and having to backup the database often, incase the forum database is damaged or deleted.

It was a cheaper operation to run the forums, before hackers damaged these forums back in 2005 or 6, and afterwards I believe that costs went way way up, due to increased security. So I think that Moderating and security is the reason. I had forgotten, but it seems like the hackers deleted 2 or 3 months of posts.

Being CATHOLIC.COM brings in so much traffic, that it would swamp a place like Geocaching dot com forums, that has crashed a number of times. It is starting to get too expensive to operate the geocaching forums due to the traffic, spam control, and moderation.