Hosting List and Emails Financial Vote

(Section 5 Finances
B. Definition of Chronicles

An eligible chronicle is defined as a chronicle that has donated the full suggested donation or better and has all the rights and privileges of full membership in OWBN. Applying chronicles and chronicles on probation prior to becoming full members of OWBN are not eligible. Chronicles that are on probation due to disciplinary reasons are not permitted to vote on any financial matters.
New Chronicles who have passed into full membership are eligible to donated and vote on financial matters.
Only chronicles who have paid the full donation are eligible to vote on financial matters. The Financial Coordinator must keep a record of those chronicles and provide it to the Executive for tabulating votes.)

To date, while we have been doing two websites for a while, we have been paying $42.95 / month for the old site, and $100.00 a year for the new site, for a total of $615.40 / year. The new site was supposed to take us down by quite a bit.

Below are the specifications, even at its most expensive, its still less than what we have been paying.

If each chronicle paid the suggested $10 a year donation, we would have more than enough for this with extra for emergencies. To date, that has not been happening, it is a very small number of chronicles who have been donating and we have been secure only because we had excess funds from the years of donations being mandatory. We have $26 in the bank and $1014 in Paypal. Still very comfortable, but it is going down.

Our email lists are very important to the functioning of the org, but we can not be hosted on things like yahoo or google, we are too intense in volume. Please direct all technical questions to the web team.

LeAmber Kensley
Financial Coord.
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Hello all,

This is going to get a bit technical, but please bear with me.

As some of you may know, our current email host cannot handle our volume of email. The reason for this is simply the size of our lists - each email sent over the Council lists ends up being approximately 200 emails being sent out of our hosts shared SMTP queue. That means that on a busy day where council gets 200-300 emails, our host is sending out 40,000-60,000 emails. This is impairing performance for other customers who are sharing the same SMTP server as us.

Granted, our emails are small, in general - we're not sending out a lot of graphics, etc. But most hosts don't look at that, and simply look at the total number of emails sent. For this reason, we tried to find a solution that would let us send an unlimited number of emails, and charge us based on the total bandwidth (size) of the emails we send out.

So, our options:

1) Go to a fully hosted virtual server. This would entail moving the web site and all databases, and porting it over to a new host. The host we choose must support our mailing list needs. The cheapest we can find of this sort is $419.88/year for a server that could possibly fulfill our needs, though the cost could go as high as $589.88/year if we find we need more bandwidth/server resources.

2) Split the email server off onto a virtual server. This would allow us to purchase a very streamlined virtual server for email only. The email server costs would be dependent on the amount of email, but rather than a "per email" charge, we would be charged only by raw bandwidth. Our website would stay with our current host. This would mean continuing to pay the $100/year for our current web host, and adding on between $127.01/year and $208.01/year, depending on our final bandwidth amount. Most likely, a "middle of the road" package of $154.01/year would suffice.

Therefore, the total costs are as follows:

Option 1: $419.88 - $589.88 per year (Most likely estimate: $475/year)
Option 2: $227.01 - $308.01 per year (Most likely estimate: $254/year)

Both options include 24/7 support for the server itself. Option 2 also includes technical support for the mailing list software (mailman).Sportswear free shippingAsics Onitsuka Tiger