I just rented a new server and in order to get the best price I could, I paid for a year upfront. That's $2126, quite a hit on my credit card, about $190/month, amortized with interest. Next year it will drop to $1776, equal to about $148/month and I intend to pay cash.

The new server has Dual Xeon 3.0 processors with 2gig of memory and two 100+gig disk drives (one just for keeping daily backups). It will be up to 8 times faster than the one we're currently running BCTS off of so I'll be moving BCTS to the new one. Gallery and the sites (ClassicBC, OriginalBC, NaughtyWords, Dark Mstress, Tuckerspawn, PGmen, BeastlyThoughts and a few others) that are on the Classic BC server will be moved to the current TopShelf server and the Classic server retired at the end of April. Then items will be moved over to the new server as time and resources permit but not to the point where we overload it.

Traffic on BCTS is growing at 5%-10% a month and with Gallery on the same server, we're tasking the CPU like crazy. Bandwidth is not the problem but the new server will also have more BW. The $119 a month for the Classic server will be going away in April and also the $20 a month for the virtual server where I've been keeping the movies will go away in July. But this pretty much wipes out the savings I was going to start figuring for having replaced the old $110/month BCTS server with a $49/month and $20/month one. I had been intending to drop my requested donations from $400 a month to $250 after January was paid for but right now, I'm going to leave the request as is till at least April is paid. Which at the rate things go will probably be sometime in June. :)

I've got one other virtual server that I pay $60 a year for experimentation but Bob Arnold is letting me play with one of his servers to do experiments on and run our chat room. Bob picks up the cost for that and helps me out with administration and advice when I need it. When the little X server rental expires next January, I probably will not renew it.

Just keeping people up to date on the finances here at BC. :)

- Erin