ResellerRatings is running on 4 dedicated servers costing more than $1500/mo. We have a full time staff including merchant account liasons, admins, developers, daily deal editor, etc, plus marketing costs ($1500/mo gas card promotions and much more in advertising fees), etc. Our site receives nearly 1 million monthly users. We have 400 merchants who subscribe to our Merchant Member program and another 2,000 who subscribe to our free tools. So yes, ResellerRatings is very much alive and well and yes we do spend plenty on the site.
The search function error you saw is possibly a bug - I haven't seen that before.
The calendar function is disabled because no one uses it.
The PM function is disabled because merchants must subscribe to our Merchant Member program to contact customers, rather than using PM's to circumvent that. If we are able to implement a workaround for this at some point, we will.