Is anybody home at steamlocomotive.info ? Their contrib@steamlocomotive.info address bounces and no one ever answers at info@steamlocomotive.info . I'm trying to submit some corrections and the site sees updates but I cannot get a hold of anyone. Has any one else had any luck there?

I have no idea what is wrong with the guy over there.

http://steamlocomotive.info/

Works for me.

Not the site, the people behind it. Cannot get anyone to reply to mail messages. There is out-of-date info on the site and nobody seems to answer e-mail.

Seriously, Chris. I'm aware that the contributors@steamlocomotive.info mailbox no longer works. We used to have an autoresponder on the thing that sent the word document, but it was abused to send the document to people who hadn't requested it, so we shut that down.

I looked back through the info@steamlocomotive.info mailbox, and I'm pretty sure I did, somehow miss your emails. The only one in there was from Monday, and it was a no subject, no content message.

If you want to PM your corrections to me here, I'll make them. Or if you want to call me, let me know and I'll send you our 800 number.

Regards,
Doug

And as to nobody being home, that'd be a fairly accurate assessment. The site is a hobby, and takes up way too much of my time (and costs way too much to run) as it is.

Thanks Doug. I wasn't sure if it was your site or not, despite your RYPN user name. Will PM you shortly.



Boy do I ever feel your pain there.

I totally agree with both of you...

By the way, there's lots of money to be made from the internet. There must be, since I've certainly put plenty of money into it, so somebody must be making money. :)

If you run a website for fun and (lack of) profit, here's a tip. Don't ever add up what you spend in hosting fees, software licenses, domain renewals, advertising and dozens of other expenses. If you do, you'll quickly shut down your sites and take up a less expensive hobby, like burning $20 bills...

Hmm, I never thought it was all that expensive.

I've been running a bunch for years using 1and1.com's hosting and it's about $60/yr.
http://order.1and1.com:80/xml/order/Hos ... _lf=Static

SSL Certs are a little pricier, but using a hosted service like that has saved us LOTS of headaches at the CRHS.

We use the "Beginner" package there, and it's working just fine for our 15000+ page site running the Drupal CMS System.

steamlocomotive.info runs on a dedicated Coldfusion MX8 server, and uses a Microsoft SQL Server 2005 database. We were never able to find hosted service for this, and since we are a web hosting company, we do it ourselves.

Power, bandwidth, cooling, software licenses for steamlocomotive.info have run about $2400/year

Yikes! That's a LOT of money!

Cold Fusion... it'll get ya every time.

That's why I love Open Source PHP/MySQL solutions.

They're so common that they're super cheap to host (like TheCRHS.org is).

If we spent more than $100 a year on hosting our treasurer would beat me with an air hose...

So SteamLocomotive.info runs on a dedicated server?

Does the load justify that?

Depends on the site, and how much traffic it gets. My traffic is far higher than most railroad museums get. My model train site gets 150,000 hits per DAY from over 2,000 visitors. MRSR, like most other tourist railways, would love to have that problem. :)

http://www.railroadforums.com typically has between 100 and 200 concurrent users online pretty much any time of the day and even most nights. Add in several more forums, including the model railroad site that is even more popular, and your bandwidth and hosting fees start looking ugly.