On 19/12/2005 12:30 PM, Larry Blanchard wrote:

Doug, could you provide some figures on costs of continuing the Usenet
feed?

I don't have $$ figures at hand (luckily for me it's not my direct
responsibility any more because it was a big !&^%&!%@ headache), but see
my previous posting about staffing, etc. It's really not so much the
purchase costs as it is the ongoing stuff. Servers are relatively cheap,
staffing is not, 24x7x365 reliability and redundancy, and maintaining
currency are not. Around here, even the rack space the servers use is an
issue, as is the A/C and electricity/UPS. By themselves they're small
change; taken as part of the whole, they're near the top of the list for
removal when things get really tight.

Keep in mind that I'm not trying to defend Rogers here. I work at a
University, not a big ISP. It sounds like they were pretty heavy-handed
in the way the way they handled the cancellation. But I don't use 'em
for Internet. I prefer DSL. I *think* my DSL ISP (Execulink) provides a
Usenet feed, but I just use the one at work since it's more convenient
for me, and it carries internal groups that we don't send to the world
that I need to use as part of my job. When it goes, I'll find one
elsewhere.

Let's face it, the Web is where it's at today. I see a lot of other
forums (fora?) moving from Usenet to Web-based things.