Moonbeam,
Income for the site is less than a tenth of what you surmise and every penny goes to pay for the server and software. No administrator or moderator gets a cent - not even phone bills covered.
Each time we upgrade the server due to traffic we're already speccing, costing and working on the next. European figures show overall internet traffic doubling every hundred days at the moment and Chinese is just about to become the majority language in terms of throughput.
We watch all this very warily as the next logical step in hardware and bandwidth puts us into the 5,000 USD per month league for costs. Crashdive is busy doing some extremely lateral thinking and coding to see if we can put this off for as long as possible by creating an entirely different concept in bulletin board software.
Alternatively we can charge for the site - we reckon that in a couple of months we could run the place on the old 386 I've got in the garage.
Regards from the Towers
Rob Lloyd
[email protected]