I dont agree that ES was perfect as is, and it will take a lot more than free hosting to fix. Think money and time.
We had major calamity with back ups and restoration from back up. Nobody but one person knows what happened but as we all know a lot of images and data were lost. For the most part the owner was non existant through this calamity and to this day has not communicated on what really happened. There was lost data in the server migration that took place last night but not as severe. As i understand it ES was based for a long time on a personal computer...a very dangerous proposition.Its very evident from the calamity that happened that there were problems with the data back up system. The old pictures seem to be unrecoverable.
ES is antiquated in terms of back end design. PHPBB is not the ideal solution for this large a forum and we have been paying the price with data problems, inadequate search engine. spammers, etc. Moderators spend many hours killing spam that would be non existent with better back end system.
The forums are in a disarray and need to be reorganized. Its hard to find relevant data and when you do its full of broken images and data.
The front page was a horribly designed page for a server company that made these forums look weird and made us almost irrelevant in terms of google search results. With just an electric bike related page we would be twice as visible and findable to the general public and would continue growing as a userbase.
The former owner was not doing this as a not for profit enterprise, because he just sold the site without warning probably paying himself a descent wage (depending on selling price) for the hours of time he did dedicate for keeping this forum alive.
The back end of the server has not changed much since the conception of the sphere. We have been pretty stagnant in terms of software improvement, making ES a great hang out for geeks...but missing some of the slickness which would attract mass new users. I know a lot of us dont want to attract mass users..but if you want a revolution its got to exist of more than just geeks.
The new owner is offering to put the site on a more robust faster server with professional back up system (3 figures a year) update the phpbb to a more robust vbulletin (250 a year) hire programming team to help him (expensive), dedicate his own time full time. Last night we migrated to new server.
So in short, in terms of profit or non-profit nothing has really changes except that ES has a new owner who is promising to be more of an active presence and dump money and massive time into the forums.
Whether the new owner is better than the old owner is the question that only time will answer. He appeared out of the blue and has that unknown quality about him that is for sure. He did build himself an electric bike with help from ES so we know he is not that much of an alien
.