Any way of making The Haven Net website run for free?

[Taffy]

Well, I was looking on the FAQ just a minute ago, it seems that no profit is derived from donations made, which is a good thing. I was wondering if it was possible to use this information to run The Haven Net website for free i.e. get it registered as a non-profit organisation. I dunno about what sorts of things that non-profit organisations need to do in order to become a non-profit organisation (if you know what I mean)

I believe the freewebs.com run free servers for non-profit organisations.

May be worth a look to see how you get registered.

http://www.freewebs.com

 

[Fi$hy]

I think the problem would be, even if there is some benefit from effectivly being a "charity" is that it would then be recognised as a business, with financial liability etc.

As anyone who's donated here knows, S-Fury keeps the financial side as far away from him as possible, to avoid any kind of personal liability should THN "go-under"

Interesting idea though..

 

[Haven]

Since you are never "purchasing" anything there is no liability to be had. You have no rights to anything in return for you hard earned cash, and all funds are clearly marked as donations. If Fury were to do a runner with the funds (not suggesting he would - this is an example) then we would just shrug and take it on the nose and then start over. We're talking about very small sums of money to run the server anyway so its really a moot point about liability.

With regards to "could we make THN website run for free ?" sure we could - I used to host it on my home ADSL and those who were around at the time can tell you that it really wasn't much fun. However as long as the donations keep flowing we may as well host on a decently connected server with plenty of bandwidth.

I dont see any benefit to registering ourselves as a not for profit organisation.

 

[Ronin Storm]

Yeah, really just to add to what Haven says:

We've two main costs for THN:

1. Web Site Hosting.
2. Games Server Hosting.

The former is currently hosted "for free" by Haven. Some additional costs, such as vBulletin, have been covered through one-off community donations. I will probably cover our vBulletin support renewal when that comes up (it's only around £20).

The latter is currently hosted by ValueServers and paid for through our community's monthly donations, which are managed by SgtFury. In a sense, this is the bulk of our costs. Things would become radically cheaper if we weren't running our own games servers, but we like that flexibility so we choose to pay for it.

So, in a sense, THN already runs for free. In actuality, Haven will probably continue to provide hosting out of his own pocket because he's doing that anyway (not precluding that he might choose to change that, just making guesses) and I will keep our vBulletin install upgraded and supported as long as it remains one of my main interests here (for some time to come yet, it seems). Our games server will stay as long as we can support it, and leave when we can't or aren't interested in it any longer.

All make sense?