Someone explain this to me: Karl Keating says it costs $143,000 a year to maintain the "Catholic Answers Forums."
He says also the entire Catholic Answers website costs $411,000 a year "to maintain the site, as well as protect it from anti-Catholic hackers who are constantly trying to sabotage it."
Can someone explain costs? I can only speculate the forums must pay their moderators.
I looked at the the Catholic Answers tech job postings. Based on those it appears that they are a Microsoft shop, though they are using an open source database (MySQL). So, they would have MS licensing fees to pay as well as some sort of hosting fees. I would speculate that the "maintenance" of the forums has to do mostly with the costs of backing up and maintaining their databases, as well as any hosting costs for the db's themselves (assuming that all of this is hosted, of course).
ReplyDeleteAs for the running of the website itself, you would have salaries and other costs for the personnel. Four hundred thousand doesn't sound like all that much for a database administrator, a couple of UI / programmer types, and an admin or two.
The line about anti-Catholic hackers is comical for at least two reasons;
1) According to K. Keating, any hacker of CA is by definition, anti-Catholic, even though their main motivation is probably for credit card data rather than to bring CA off-line.
2) It doesn't cost any more to protect your site from anti-Catholic hackers than it does from any other kind of hacker.
Why can't they just run a bingo?
ReplyDeleteAre parish churches the only ones allowed to run bingo?
My old church still runs one.
Thanks EA,
ReplyDeleteThat the forums cost so much still seems odd. I'm sure something like the CARM boards doesn't require nearly as much money, and I think the boards are superior to those of Catholic Answers.
I can only think they must pay moderators. In which case, they're not doing a very good job because i've been posting on CA for years.
Hi James,
ReplyDeleteYou're welcome.
I don't disagree. Besides the forums, CA is a B2C website (taking order via credit cards, etc...)which it appears is staffed by full-time employees and I'm assuming is hosted by a third party. Given that, I wouldn't be surprised if their overhead ran to the mid / high six figures.
Good luck with the Morse arrangement. My goal is to master the Rick Foster / Christopher Parkening arrangement of Bach's Cantata BWV 208 (Sheep May Safely Graze) for guitar. Please pray for me!