waterproofbob
Junior Administrator
Good afternoon all,
Its time for a frank and open discussion on funding for THN - specifically funding Promethius and where we go from here on.
Firstly a big thank you to those that have been and still are contributing to THN you guys rock and the admin team do have something planned to recognise contributors.
The issue: Promethius costs us £64.58 per month. Our donations cover £67.50 (minus around 5% for paypal costs). The bad part is that we are 4-5 months behind on payments so £323 are going to be owed to the bank of Haven a the end of November.
Our colocation costs are £64.58 but that's not all the subscription pool pays for. We also cover vBulletin annual maintenance (more on that below), which memory tells me was around £60. We also need to consider hardware maintenance costs as Prom is two years old (or more?) and we will need consider what replaces her, or her parts, when she fails.
Part of the reason for the backlog is down to the fact that some subs had dropped and at the beginning of August we were down to just under £40 coming in a month however the main issue is that we have never had donations at the level we need to keep us rocking as we are. I should have also been on top of this issue and it is entirely my fault that we are in the position we are in and for that I apologise . I'm going to be starting up a raffle tonight as well which is a great way to get an injection of funds however raffles don't really solve the problem long term. We have literally in the last few weeks picked up an additional £20 a month worth of donations that means we are sitting in a much better situation however it doesn't solve the current backlog and it doesn't cover all the costs for keeping THN going.
Haven should not be out of pocket running THN, doubly not since there's an active community of around 100 people across the board and TeamSpeak (in various different ways, at various different times). Currently, less than 10% of the active community contribute financially to supporting THN. I would like to see that figure increase. I appreciate that some will not be able to contribute and that is fine. However if people who think that were to donate £1 those would soon add up and £12 over a year is about the same as a takeaway pizza (unless you live outside the UK then it's like 3 takeaway pizzas
). However there is something else to consider at this point.
This is however assuming we want to keep Promethius as there is always the option of cutting back to a VPS (virtual private server) solution that would allow us to cut back to web hosting and a small teamspeak server for £15/month. This is a one way street as once Promethius leaves the data centre it will never go back. There is also additional costs/help required for getting Prom out of the data centre if we go this route but we'll sort that later if that is where we choose to go. These solutions will not leave us with the same level of services as we will be RAM constrained which may harm PHP performance. But they should allow us to continue to run the basics. Game hosting would have to move to users home machines for those on good enough internet connections.
This is obviously a much cheaper option however personally I wouldn't like to see that happen, I love the services we are currently able to provide and it would really suck if we lost those. Especially as the number of people we have using TS3, partaking in TF2 evenings and getting other games such as minecraft and L4D going is on the rise. With the server it also gives us opportunity for future games or other things that we'd like to do.
Its time for a frank and open discussion on funding for THN - specifically funding Promethius and where we go from here on.
Firstly a big thank you to those that have been and still are contributing to THN you guys rock and the admin team do have something planned to recognise contributors.
The issue: Promethius costs us £64.58 per month. Our donations cover £67.50 (minus around 5% for paypal costs). The bad part is that we are 4-5 months behind on payments so £323 are going to be owed to the bank of Haven a the end of November.
Our colocation costs are £64.58 but that's not all the subscription pool pays for. We also cover vBulletin annual maintenance (more on that below), which memory tells me was around £60. We also need to consider hardware maintenance costs as Prom is two years old (or more?) and we will need consider what replaces her, or her parts, when she fails.
Part of the reason for the backlog is down to the fact that some subs had dropped and at the beginning of August we were down to just under £40 coming in a month however the main issue is that we have never had donations at the level we need to keep us rocking as we are. I should have also been on top of this issue and it is entirely my fault that we are in the position we are in and for that I apologise . I'm going to be starting up a raffle tonight as well which is a great way to get an injection of funds however raffles don't really solve the problem long term. We have literally in the last few weeks picked up an additional £20 a month worth of donations that means we are sitting in a much better situation however it doesn't solve the current backlog and it doesn't cover all the costs for keeping THN going.
Haven should not be out of pocket running THN, doubly not since there's an active community of around 100 people across the board and TeamSpeak (in various different ways, at various different times). Currently, less than 10% of the active community contribute financially to supporting THN. I would like to see that figure increase. I appreciate that some will not be able to contribute and that is fine. However if people who think that were to donate £1 those would soon add up and £12 over a year is about the same as a takeaway pizza (unless you live outside the UK then it's like 3 takeaway pizzas
). However there is something else to consider at this point. This is however assuming we want to keep Promethius as there is always the option of cutting back to a VPS (virtual private server) solution that would allow us to cut back to web hosting and a small teamspeak server for £15/month. This is a one way street as once Promethius leaves the data centre it will never go back. There is also additional costs/help required for getting Prom out of the data centre if we go this route but we'll sort that later if that is where we choose to go. These solutions will not leave us with the same level of services as we will be RAM constrained which may harm PHP performance. But they should allow us to continue to run the basics. Game hosting would have to move to users home machines for those on good enough internet connections.
This is obviously a much cheaper option however personally I wouldn't like to see that happen, I love the services we are currently able to provide and it would really suck if we lost those. Especially as the number of people we have using TS3, partaking in TF2 evenings and getting other games such as minecraft and L4D going is on the rise. With the server it also gives us opportunity for future games or other things that we'd like to do.
