Hey Jim,

Good questions. I originally had this covered when I first developed the donation page, though because of the information depth required, the page was bloated for what it needed, so here is the bloated version I guess. To understand the cost, you need to understand a few other factors first.

At present the way this forum is structured suits its high volume of user traffic, and constantly rising, without crashing the forum or affecting other users, ie. lagging the forum to when hundreds are online at once. This is achieved via the way I have the site hosted, being it is contained upon my server which is a Virtual Private Server (VPS) through a company called Servint. Being within the web world behind the scenes for a decade as I have, Servint are the best at what they do, and they don't fluff their statements to sell services, they are truly the best VPS and dedicated hosting provider upon the web, hands down.

You must understand the hosting because it impacts how this forum and a mentor program works, being the one I have in mind. There are only a handful of actual server banks connected into the backbone of the WWW, Servint is part of one of those. The majority of hosts people employ for their websites, are shared hosting to begin with, which means you could have thousands of users all hosting on the one server, meaning any one of those users do a stupid thing and the server goes down, thus taking everyone else with them. This is why you see a lot of websites up and down when visiting them, being sometimes you get an error page.

The only time you will see this forum down is when I'm actually doing something behind the scenes, like recently when I upgraded MySQL to version 5.0 and took out all my sites for an hour whilst having to find and fix an error that occurred. Otherwise, my hosting really does have a 99.99999999999999% uptime guarantee on it, unlike 99% of the hosting companies only telling people that to sell more products. 99% of the hosting companies are subsidiary companies that rent server space from another main provider, thus more middlemen in the picture, etc etc. The more routes travelled, the more can and does go wrong basically. After years of researching hosting companies for myself, when you need a robust host that does not fail you, Servint is the only real choice, hence why this forum and my websites are all with them.

So, my VPS has only 3 others on the server at any one time, which means its a quarter shared server maximum, though could only have my sites on the server if no others are hosting that same account. Basically, the company move accounts between servers as required depending on who's sites are drawing more system resources than others, ensuring all websites are well balanced and don't fail, or break the server. Hosts don't generally do this, hence why they have a lot of downtime, hence why Servint has such terrific performance and reliability to others.

So at present it costs me US$80 per month for my server to run the traffic that my sites get, this forum being the largest trafficked site of all. So thats only US$960.00pa, which is excellent for what I get. What I have now though would not run a full-scale mentoring program, either the server or the way in which the chat system is structured.

The chat system is a significant component to providing a mentoring program, and that means a stable mentoring program, being the $2400 question. It would actually now be more expensive than my original estimates due to the nature of the beast.

The chat system I own outright, no ongoing fee's or charges. Yes, upgrades do come out and I pay for those if required. The company who designed the chat system is about to release more upgrades and some newer products, so I may improve it again.

Understanding how the chat system works is to understand how the costs are derived. A mentor program would consist of the ability to assign those who have healed their trauma and are minimum within learning how to manage PTSD for the remainder of their lives. Basically, we would not assign a two people together who have not healed so they can fuel one another, agree that their wrongs are right, etc etc... it would be a delicate balance and trial and error with each mentor I believe. New users in diar need of help could be assigned a said volunteer mentor though, where they have video and audio "private" support, not a public interface program such as MSN, ICQ or the like that are hacked more readily. The mentor program is the easy part, the difficult part is getting the system resources to handle it.

If you have looked at the chat system, the text components of the chat require no further software or interaction, being the main text chat and instant message components. The video/audio component however require what is called Flash Media Server (FMS) in conjunction to actually stream the live video/audio. Most people don't understand what goes on behind the scenes when they use these lovely features upon the web, nor do they likely understand the costs incurred to run them. I guess you could say its like people not understanding the costs to run a video chat between their mobile phones, and no doubt jump up and down at the cost to do said video chat on mobiles, because they don't understand the complexity of what is behind the scenes to run that video chat.

Firstly the server must be upgraded to dedicated. This is based on FMS, being supplied by Adobe at a cost of US$4500, which requires a Pentium 4, 3.2GHz (Dual Xeon or higher recommended) system with atleast 1Gb Ram to run it. At present I hire through a third part the FMS component so that users can chat with video/audio, at a cost currently at US$35.00 per month, US$420pa. That is run through a company called Influxis. Now many varations can be done, but basically, the 15Gb of bandwidth that comes with this cost currently only caters a small amount of actual live streaming video chat, ie. 20 hours maybe, then that depends on how many streams (users) are on at once, etc etc. One big group chat we have can use around 3 - 5Gb in one setting because of the users.

This method basically isn't a feasible method where a mentor program could require two persons chatting for 20+ hours between them each month, then how many pairs (mentor + sufferer) would be participating at once? Eventually a whole lot, so this is why I am looking for the long term viability of a robust system that won't need changing for many years to come. To get what I expect from a third party company such as Influxis, would require one of their dedicated packages at a cost of either US$220 pm or next package US$460 pm, that equates to US$2640 - US$5520pa just for the FMS use. As you can see, simply purchasing FMS outright is more cost effective than hiring either one of those packages, being whether the money would be made in two years or one, depending on the intensive requirements and how well the mentor program does.

So, the current system won't support such a robust global mentoring program by itself, so expansion is the only way forward. To do this we come back to the server + including FMS onto the server at a one time cost. FMS requires a Pentium 4, 3.2GHz (Dual Xeon or higher recommended) system, so Servint provide a dedicated server solution at US$299 pm (US$3588pa) to host the forum + FMS on a Dual Processor Dual Core Intel Woodcrest 5130, meaning 4 Total 2.00 GHz Cores. When you compare processors, basically FMS will run on one P4 3.2, though this server has 4 x 2.0Ghz processors doing its work, which means well enough processor base in order to run FMS, it has 2Gb Ram and 1800 gig of bandwidth. If you go back to the third party host Influxis, at $460 pm we're only getting 300gb of transfer at a 3Mbs bandwidth. Using our own server where FMS and the forum are hosted together, there is more than we could need at present, and plenty left as the forum continues to expand.

Only two issues at present is coming up with some of the funding, and then waiting for Servint to release more of these servers as they have sold out at present. I have spoken with them prior, and they can install the FMS to a dedicated server for me, the disk would simply be sent to them to install and manage. The funding for the server per annum I can manage myself, with or without donations, though at present the funding for the FMS has to be found then ongoing donations would then help me to fund the ongoing cost of running the tools in order for the program to run.

At present I have quite tight control over the video chat, and limit it at times even or else I end up with a rather large bill from influxis for going over the limit. A mentor program cannot have limits, and once people get assigned to help another out, video chat or audio chat can be quite long and intensive. Obviously another issue arises, in that people would need broadband to have video chat, though audio chat can be done with dialup.

Not sure if all that answers your questions or not Jim... basically, its all the behind the scenes cost in order to even run the program is what is limiting its progression at present.