MyFurnitureForum Costs

I spent $ 937.00 today to renew www.myfurnitureforum.com and the hosting for this forum with the provider, the server contract renewals couldn't have come at a worse time. I have to tell you quite honestly, I pondered the entire morning whether to spend the money on it and seriously considered just closing it down at the end of this month. Had I asked my wife, she would have said "absolutely not!" on spending the renewal fees.

Covid-19 has killed sales for my business as it has with thousands of others and I'm watching every remaining dollar. I could move to Facebook for free, and I already have a presence there, however Facebook is not very good at archiving and databasing topics and records.

I don't have membership requirements for users of this forum (many forums do) and it's always been free. I know many people use it extensively and buy from other dealers, and that's fine - just know there is a cost to run this and nothing is truly "free" (Facebook collects and sells data which is why there is no charge to host a business presence there). The Ads you see on the forum do generate income to help pay for this, but revenue from clicks has gone way down to be of no substantial benefit.

If you visit one of the sponsor's websites each time you come to www.myfurnitureforum.com by clicking an ad, know it benefits the operation and cost of this forum. And if you use the forum for information and choose to buy from other dealers, consider making a PayPal donation to keeping this up and running. keepingroom@gmail.com is the paypal addy.

Thanks for keeping it going Duane. Hopefully things turn around in the next few months.

Is that the cost for a year? It seems higher than I would have expected but maybe the site has a lot of view-only traffic and the hits are much higher than I thought.

Duane, thank you for your dedication and hard work on this forum. Very few dealers out there are working this hard to educate the consumer. I hope people realize the incredible opportunity they have when they visit the forum. You provide a lot of knowledge from wood, leather and fabric products.

You’re a pioneer and we will see that this idea will be used more in the coming days to adapt to the change of the way we all shop for furniture.

Keep up the great work!

The renewal was multi-year for the URL, and the site with enhancements. Several years ago I moved it to a "fast" server which had an extra charge and also I bought space for a lot of storage so we would not have issues with too many photos archived. I am running a very old edition of VBulletin, however. It's several generations old. Costs too much to update it and pay someone to do install that update. (it's beyond my meager computer skill set).

Thanks Josh, I keep trying!