Just curious... while I do see some advertisements in the forums, I dont see any solid banner ads or anything of that sort. Only imagefilez and that wellnesspoisitivty section.

So the only money I could see helping pay for the forums are the wellnesspositivity, and imagefilez, and computinghost. I dont see how that can cover a forum of 43,000 w/ thousands of hosting accounts (which you dont oversell) meaning you must pay for a good hundred TB's and bandwidth and tens of TB's of space.

Just wondering, because the figures arent adding up in my head.

Well there are ad's places on the forum (guest view and lo-fi view), but with all the advertisements xisto has and all computinghost accounts trap17 is well covered. Of course there are not thousands of hosting accounts on trap17 and astahost, I would ball park it at little under 500 accounts total. Most of the time members either leave, go to paid hosting, or sign up and try to spam, while I would say about few thousand spread out over a course of a week are active on the forums. Also on the rare occasion people will purchase credits in a case of am emergency, so for the most part the hosting and the forums are well taking care of.

I would expect more members with over 55k members. I figured atleast 10k would have active accounts that want hosting. But i guess if you deleted all inactive members, you'd probably be sitting at 5-10k members? Anyway, is the network profitable and who makes the money?

Trap17, ComputingHost, etc. are all part of the Xisto Corporation. I know that there was a bit of a struggle towards the beginning which you can read about in the Trap17 Story. However, the forums survived and seems to have flourished enough to expand well beyond its humble beginnings.

I'm pretty sure that there are only a few thousand who are actually active, less who are hosted and even less that are regularly active on the forums. There's an option to purchase credits if you are running low, so some people opt for that. Others use ComputingHost or Qupis rather than post to earn credits.

I'm sure Trap17 has had it's fair share of hosted members over the course of it's life. But people upgrade as their site grows so as people come in, others go out. Also some people that join the forums come here thinkiing the site is something else or they have trouble getting hosting because their posts don't come up to standards and they aren't willing to change. Others just have to move on in life or will upgrade to Computinghost which brings Xisto more money. Trap17 is really sort of like a demo of Computing host in a way. That's why people upgrade to Computinghost from Trap17 and Astahost. They know that the services come at a good value and there is plenty of support.

yeah, that seems to be about right. I mean, i am only new here but yeah, i was attracted because of the Free hosting so yeah, people will come and go and many will not remain active the boards at all.

Thanks for making this topic and all of the replies from mods.
Let's just say I've had all too many hosts die on me because they haven't gotten enough sponsorship. I've grown good at predicting it, first they force ads no matter what package, then they increase the amount of posts needed- this continues until they just dissapear.
Trap17 seems pretty trust worthy to me.

From what i know i dont remember how long ago i signed up...

but it was a while ago lol

In Fact KuBi refered me here, hes a mod here if you dont know or at least he was one a while back...

but i started with the free hosting that you guys offer... i think i did that 3-4 times lol just becasue i got tired of posting or forgot to post or was too busy to post...

Now after those 3-4 times of free hosting i just refered my "boss" more of a friend that i work with on our site to here since i knew that the free hosting was good and was also what they used but on other dedicated servers!

So we are trying this out for the first time as hosted! so far its good however support just went offline lol so i gotta wait a while before it comes back online and figure out my problems im having switching our domain name dns stuff to point to the new host...

Anyways its good to have "friends" in this buisiness Computing Host uses trap17 forums for there "tech support forums" and trap 17 uses there hosting so its a pretty big circle thats nice to have

anyways thanks trap17 for helpin us webmasters out!

ComputingHost has more hosted clients than Trap17.

ComputingHost gets majority customers from Trap17.

ComputingHost profits when Trap17 Grows.

ComputingHost will do anything to keep Trap17 Active, Alive and Running.

ComputingHost wishes its members to be happy and enjoy their hosting :-) so that it gets good clients out of good faith and trust :-)

ComputingHost believes more in customer relationship than simple business. Till date, we have never retained any clients money or made him unhappy before leaving. We have approved refunds not only for first 30 days but even after a year.

Thank you to all Trap17 Members and especially its Staff to make it what it is today :-)

If you are asking WHY??
Here is a simple answer :-

We are more than satisfied with what we are earning and with our business. We have always made growths in tiny amounts with tiny steps. We never jumped into big business locking our assets. We do not lock our funds in the process of gaining more in short frame of time. Till date, we have always looked upon our members as our friends. We have helped them (out of our contract terms) to solve their issues to bring that smile of satisfaction. We do this job out of interest and love for the internet community.

Talking about Trap17, I believe that the site which is my daily bread and butter should get better than what it deserves. Ads are no doubt a good money making solution. They used to be all over Trap17 (old members would know). But that was a different time.. you can say, I didn't have a choice. The day my situation improved, I decided to remove them and make it more convenient for members.

Trap17 cuts its income by more than 50% in keeping the forums ad-free :-) However, in the end, its quality and service that matters. We might not be a BIG company, but we haven't let that affect our customers at any point. We agree we are young a