Time To Say Goodbye!

[MG - Admin]

After nearly 19 years of hosting the ProShow Enthusiasts forum, it's time to say goodbye. During the heyday of the forum we had upwards of 5,000 active accounts posting and commenting each month. With nearly 20,000 topics and over 150,000 posts accumulated over the past 19 years, this was clearly more successful than I would have ever imagined.

With Photodex going out of business things have slowed down quite a bit. I'm very grateful for the members here who helped support the forum with their participation and donations. Without all of you, this forum would never have grown to it's height, nor maintained some level of activity even now.

After careful thought and consideration, I've decided to shut down the forum for good on May 1st. The main reason for this has to do with cost. It's roughly $600 per year to host the site and other costs such as domain renewals, etc. make it more than I'm comfortable continuing to pay. Due to the size of the database, I can't simply have the site hosted on a shared server product, and even with the VPS hosting that I've been using for the last 10 or so years, the forum runs into issues due to the sheer size of the database. I'm sure many of you have come to visit the site and had it be shut down with SQL errors, etc. I don't have the free time to diagnose the issues most of the time, and putting in service tickets takes time and can be frustrating to deal with depending on the responses I get from the host.

I'm not sure if anyone out there is interested in taking over, but the process may be complicated to just hand over. I'm assuming I would just zip up the file structures and back up the database and let someone have a go at it if they desire, but I may be oversimplifying the process of moving it over to another hosting service. If anyone is interested, send me an email and we can discuss.

Thank you again to everyone who has supported the forum over the years. I appreciate each and every one of you!!

Mike