|
It is a "sunk cost" of sorts a lot of the time, but it hasn't always been, and won't always be.
The very worst of it was circa 1994 when I bought it from its co-founder to keep it alive. The payments kept me in hock for a year as did the phone lines for 7 modems.
It can take a tenth of the T1 on really good days, all during the peak hours (weekday afternoons) and I am reselling that bandwidth to real, paying clients, so it doesn't have zero impact. More importantly, when there was filesystem corruption the other week it was located in Cellar files and impacted my other clients severely. It also attracts hacker/cracker attention (I was DOSsed once) and occasionally, undue traffic which impacts the whole business. So my best bet in the long run would be to isolate it from the rest of my activity, but that would co$t much more and have a huge time impact.
When there is extra money in it I send it to Google for advertising (as right now - do a search on "intelligent people" or "interesting pictures" - don't click on the ad or it will cost us $0.10) or Fark classifieds or anything else that appears to truly bring people.
As for /.ing, it has never been, but /.ing is not what it used to be since /. is not what it used to be.
As for vBulletin I bought an "owned" license in the beginning but will be "re-upping" soon and buying their "no copyright notice required" version, in order to graduate to version 3, and that will cost $150 all told. There are often these sorts of expenses and if it weren't for the charity of one particular Cellarite, whom I forget if they want to be anonymous about it, donations would cover probably half of them.
|