Fun with Numbers: December 2010

Ronin Storm

Ronin Storm

Administrator
Staff member
Inspired by a similar thread over at Bay 12, here's how we're doing with our finances to run Promethius and THN's infrastructure:

Code: 
Outstanding Invoices		£129.16
Cash in Kitty			£70.00
				=======
Debt Exposure to THN		£59.16

4 months to pay of THN debt @	£14.79 / month

Code: 
Donations for last six months:
June 2010			£42.50
July 2010			£37.50
August 2010			£42.50
September 2010			£47.50
October 2010			£332.50
November 2010			£105.00

Anticipated donations:
December 2010			£95.00 approx

Code: 
Monthly costs (before Jan 2011)	£64.58
Monthly costs (after Jan 2011)	£65.95 approx

Total costs 'til end of debt	£80.40 approx / month

Promethius replacement fund	£330 approx by end of 2011

Those numbers are actually pretty encouraging as we're now covering our costs and starting to save for a replacement/update for Promethius. £330 won't get us far but hopefully we can bolster that with some raffle funds or similar.

Thank you everyone for your support!
 
Wol

Wol

In Cryo Sleep
Out of interest, what does the £65 monthly cost actually cover? I'm guessing that includes the actual internet connection somewhere, but what else is included in that?
 
Ronin Storm

Ronin Storm

Administrator
Staff member
Haven will correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe all that includes is:

  • Rack space
  • Power
  • Internet connection
  • Remote console access
  • Some basic monitoring and support (i.e. power cycle requests)
 
Wol

Wol

In Cryo Sleep
I'm guessing domain name registration/24 goes into that too, although thats fairly negligible!

Is there any particular reason that the DIY method of getting rack space and putting your own hardware in it is used compared to just buying a dedicated server from somewhere? You can get some fairly hefty dedicated servers for about £60/month as far as I've seen in my travels and dont have to pay for hardware on top of that.
 
Haven

Haven

Administrator
Staff member
I'm guessing domain name registration/24 goes into that too, although thats fairly negligible!
Click to expand...
I'm a nominet registrar - I'll continue to handle the domain out of my own pocket.

Is there any particular reason that the DIY method of getting rack space and putting your own hardware in it is used compared to just buying a dedicated server from somewhere? You can get some fairly hefty dedicated servers for about £60/month as far as I've seen in my travels and dont have to pay for hardware on top of that.
Click to expand...
Most of this is covered in conversations on the dev mailing list and will probably be discussed on there throughout next year also.

To get the RAM and Disk space that we have on Promethius there is nothing online that competes for price. RAM particularly is hugely expensive to rent and for high RAM systems co-loc works out a lot cheaper.

Getting the best we can for our money is high on the agenda - once you get to 4GB+ RAM setups things start getting very expensive. If we cut games hosting out of the equation then our requirements drop considerably and we can consider Virtual Hosting. Also, customising what we have for what we want by choosing our own hardware has always been personally desirable for me at least.

As for the hardware costs, Promethius was again covered out of my own pocket using my old gaming rig and a 1U case with only a few replacement parts required to make it a viable server. So far I think its proven that using Desktop hardware is good enough for what we need (Not that I'd turn down using server grade kit if we could afford it :P).

Nothing has yet been decided about what we will do once it comes time to replace Promethius - Depending on what our requirements are in a years time I'd consider either Co-Loc with new hardware or VPS over leasing a dedicated machine. Obviously bearing in mind what we can afford as a large part of this decision.

I'm currently trialling a personal VPS (destiny.thehavennet.org.uk) with this in mind to find out how well it works out for most of what we do as well as for my own stuff.
 
Wol

Wol

In Cryo Sleep
Fair enoughs.

Haven said:
To get the RAM and Disk space that we have on Promethius there is nothing online that competes for price. RAM particularly is hugely expensive to rent and for high RAM systems co-loc works out a lot cheaper.
Click to expand...

I thought that generally prices for dedicated servers weren't that expensive these days but I can't say ive looked that much into it!

the only other dedicated server i use for gaming is ones my mates have which is over in germany so takes about 20ms longer to talk to it but still fine to play on. they do an i7 12gb, 1.5tb (x2 raid 1) server for £60 a month or £41 a month for 8gb and 750gb raid1 which i didn't think was that bad.
 
Traxata

Traxata

Junior Administrator
You'll find that you get a control panel and not real access to the machine, where as Haven can do ANYTHING he can think of to prom... :)

It'll also probably be on windows.
 
Wol

Wol

In Cryo Sleep
Traxata said:
You'll find that you get a control panel and not real access to the machine, where as Haven can do ANYTHING he can think of to prom... :)

It'll also probably be on windows.
Click to expand...

full root access / ssh, web interface to reset the thing, webmin if you need it to configure most stuff. runs either debian/opensuse / ubuntu 10.4/10.10 / centos or if you wish to pay for it, windows server 08. 5TB /month usage until it gets limited on network speed.
 
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