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OLLIE

New Bimmersport Leadership / Owner Wanted

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I should have done this a long time ago ... 

The resilience of Bimmersport to still be chugging along today, is a testament to our passionate members, the still dedicated admins, and a number of very important individuals.  It really proves that there is value here for enthusiastic bmw owners and that this site deserves to have some life breathed back into it. There is an immense amount of information in the archives and there is still an active member base, although not as active as it once was. 

Unfortunately the current owners, Andrew and myself can't give bimmersport the attention that it deserves, and haven't been able to for some time. Therefore I'm interested to hear from anyone who is keen to take over the running of the site, or interested in buying it. It requires a leader who can dedicate time and effort into re-establishing bimmersport as the best online car community in New Zealand.

  • Selecting and managing an admin team
  • Maintaining the Website / Forum
  • Building and managing Bimmersports social media and online presence
  • Promoting and running great events
  • Selling Advertising (online & offline) to fund the running of the site
  • Nurturing and developing the bimmersport brand
  • Managing Finances

I'm open to working out a deal with the right person/s.

If you're interested please email me ollie@bimmersport.co.nz with a bit of info about who you are, why you're interested, and in what capacity. I'll do my best to reply to emails within a reasonable timeframe, but please excuse me if I'm a bit slow, I'm travelling a lot. 

Cheers

Ollie

 

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Hopefully someone with not just the means, but the passion for this community will step up.

 

It could really take this place I love to the next level.

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9 hours ago, C-130 Hercules said:

Just an idea for fundraiser - seen on other sites where they sold calendars of member cars each year... 

There was one about 10 years ago maybe? Probably still have it somewhere

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1 hour ago, Gaz said:

There was one about 10 years ago maybe? Probably still have it somewhere

Cool - you should find it and post it for us... Blast from the past. 

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I'd buy one, and it would probably sell internationally if it was done well

 

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3 hours ago, m325i said:

I'd buy one, and it would probably sell internationally if it was done well

 

Wouldn't public holidays be an issue? Labour day on Monday for example.

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^Fair point.  Assuming you use a calendar for practical purposes. I'd just use it as an excuse to hang cars on my office wall. 

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You can have a calendar that just has days and dates... no holidays...

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11 hours ago, Gaz said:

There was one about 10 years ago maybe? Probably still have it somewhere

There was one more recent, about 5 or 6 years ago I think. I threw it out when I moved last year.

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Ive got a sealed one from 2013 if anyone wants it

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Currently, not a lot. This is due to a lot of time and services being provided for free to help with running the site. For example the site is hosted on an admin’s personal server for no cost. What it would normally cost to host a site like this I have no clue, sorry.

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Can we get any traffic stats? I can do basic hosting calculations.

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Highlighting this thread up for visibility.

@Jamez I think you have helped in the other thread to answer how the site is currently hosted and what is being done to sort out the downtime that occurred.  Are you able to provide some figures for traffic etc?

 

Edited by Driftit

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29 minutes ago, Driftit said:

Highlighting this thread up for visibility.

@Jamez I think you have helped in the other thread to answer how the site is currently hosted and what is being done to sort out the downtime that occurred.  Are you able to provide some figures for traffic etc?

 

~25GB a day of traffic and 65GB of disk (it was 300GB before I compressed all the old pictures), so something that allows 1TB of traffic per month and 100GB of disk would be about right, that would cost ~$20usd a month with Amazon lightsail ($350nzd per year).

Whilst the site is not as active as it once was, there is still quite a bit of traffic to it due to the historical content here and bimmersport ranking pretty highly in google searches.

Edited by Jamez
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Awesome thanks James.

@M3AN 

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That doesn't take into account what you would do for backups. For instance I take a full copy every night for backups and push it to my home connection which meant I did ~7TB total traffic last month lol, GBIT FTW!

Screen Shot 2020-09-16 at 10.47.32 AM.png

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1 minute ago, C-130 Hercules said:

What would it take and cost to move it to the cloud? I am no expert, just my 2c.

Amazon Lightsail (as mentioned above by James) is - I think! - a cloud platform.

There are others, with good/better/worse characteristics and price points.

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If the line of thinking is to move it to the cloud then it will be worth considering Invision Community's cloud service. Some work would have to be done around storage but it does support AWS S3 so it might be possible to use that for attachments. I imagine a lot of that 65GB is infrequently accessed. 

I'm assuming there's rarely >65 'concurrent' (ish) users? Costs could be about NZ$100 per month Invision+AWS I'd think. A lot would depend on how much of that 25GB a day traffic (which is surprisingly high) is attachment based (storage intensive). You don't pay for Invision bandwidth but you would pay for S3 bandwidth.

But also, I don't necessarily think that hosting (or ownership) needs to change to make some improvements. Changing ownership or re-homing something can be quite the undertaking.

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Given a couple of recent posts I've seen it's probably time to drag this up again.

It would be really helpful to understand, as of 2024, exactly what the ask/offer is. Is it to "buy" bimmersport, is it to save it from being turned off and disappearing, is it to run it for the current owners?

From an enthusiast community perspective I'm keen to see the forum stick around as it's a wealth of NZ-specific knowledge, but not really looking for an entire side-business, so would be good to understand how things currently lie.

Cheers,

Matt

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I spoke with the owners a few years ago, but no numbers were mentioned. I did get the impression that something would be required, despite a feeling that the whole 'looking after the forum' aspect was more of a chore than a labour of love. I think I was waiting for a further comms but nothing came of it.

The time may now be right. A fresh injection of enthusiasm could be a wonderful thing.

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