Or, ”Why is ezboard So Expensive?“

For those of you wondering about the cost of running a Gold ezboard Community, you might like to have a look at some information from various sources.

ezboard reveals its headline pricing on this page. Now, ezboard’s 12 month rates are only available to existing boards renewing so we’ll take their basic rate for starters.

This, they say, is $6 per month for 10,000 “Visits/Month”. Except it’s not. If you read on, you’ll see it’s actually page views which is much, much different to visits. For instance, to post a message on an ezboard, you’ll probably have bookmarked the board home page, so you’ll go there (1), then click into the forum you want to post in (2) then compose a new thread (3), then confirm and publish it (4). Four page views as an absolute minimum. Of course, as a Gold Community owner, you don’t get access to the actual logs or ‘proper’ web stats., just the information ezboard chooses to give you.

Let’s have a look at an ezboard Gold Community. Let’s take for instance the NikeTalk board mentioned in Robert Labatt’s Yuku blorum.

Opera tells me that the NikeTalk home page is 15,672 bytes with inline elements of 24,724 bytes which I assume means a total size of 40,396 bytes (39kb). Now NikeTalk is a very popular message board, so I’m just using their home page size as an example.

So if another ezboard with a similar design gets those 10,000 page views a month, the amount of bandwidth consumed will be 10,000 x 39kb = 381MB of bandwidth for which the board owners would pay their $6.

For $10 a month with ezboard, that community gets 25,000 page views, or 952MB of bandwidth (or put another way, less than 1GB of monthly bandwidth). All non-standard images for headers, buttons, etc. and any photos the community wanted to use would have to be stored elsewhere, of course, because ezboard provides a massive zero bytes of storage space. Oh and if the community grew well, they’d notice that after 20 pages of threads, old ones would simply be pruned by ezboard.

Now compare that with, say, DreamHost’s $9.95 a month plan. Quite apart from the 20GB of storage (which increases weekly by 160MB), you also get 1TB of bandwidth per month (again growing by 8GB a week). Add an open-source or free message board system and you’re away.

Sorry, let me just read that again … yes, with DreamHost you get 1,024 times as much monthly bandwidth as you get at ezboard.

Yes but wait. ezboard is having to recoup all those startup costs it had when Labatt and his chums at Labrador Ventures took over (we’ll obviously have to ignore DreamHost’s startup costs). What startup costs? Well, according to an article from Sean Foote at Labrador Ventures (he’s a Partner there and is also on the board of directors of ezboard, Inc., so he should know), he quotes Robert Labatt, ezboard, Inc,’s CEO as saying:

“When we went to rebuild EZboard, we went with open standards and open source code for some applications and our startup costs were maybe $1,000, not including man hours … drastically less than the hundreds of thousands of dollars the company had originally spent.”

[emphasis added]

Yes, but what about all those servers - surely they must cost a bundle? Well Sean Foote says:

“Though hardware remains the largest expense for companies such as EZboard, servers now cost just $1000, rather than the $10,000 per piece of equipment they commanded in 1999.”

Ah but what about all that bandwidth cost? Again, Sean Foote notes that:

“…bandwidth costs are down significantly…”

which probably explains why companies like DreamHost are offering 1,024 times the bandwidth for the same price as ezboard charges.

Now think again about Labatt’s “rubber ducky” post in his CEO WordPress Blog. Then consider his claim that in September last year they had 500,000 communities growing at 6,000 communities per month. Now re-acquaint yourself with ezboard’s charges per Gold community (not forgetting that non-Gold boards and trial Gold boards all carry paid-for advertising).

I’ll leave you with a quote from Robert Labatt:

“Today favors not the first-time entrepreneur or the big VC fund, but the serial entrepreneur or early stage investor who, with a couple hundred thousand dollars or a couple million from well-off friends, can finance a company himself,” says Labatt. “It’s do-it-yourself entrepreneurship.”