Hi all,
I figured I'd update everyone here.
I've renewed our current server hosting subscription for the next year, to help alleviate any outages that may be caused by paying on a month to month basis. What this means is that I paid the money out of my own bank account to put it forward, in the hopes that others donate to help subsidize at least 50% of that payment throughout the next year.
Here's a breakdown of our yearly costs, to provide a bit of transparency to you, the end users:
- Server Hosting: 364 USD/yr
- Domain Address: 16 USD/yr
- Base Costs 400 USD/yr
- Maintenance (24 Hrs * 20 Dollars): 480 USD/yr
- Total: 860 USD/yr
Let me break those numbers down a little bit. Server hosting is for the actual server that holds the files and site itself. It's an unchangeable cost unless we have to add bandwidth, in which case the cost goes up. Domain address is the registration for "club-s12.org" which allows us to be the exclusive "owner" of that address. It gives us the right to point that address to our server (see the previous lines about the server hosting). Those are the two mainly unchangeable costs.
The last one on that list is the maintenance cost. That is the cost, in hours, that Jason and I put forward to keep the site running and backed up over the course of a year. That includes occasional downtimes where we have to take the time to decrypt a site backup and restore it, time taken to pay bills, time taken to do various administration tasks that you may not see firsthand, and time taken to sort out issues. I used a very frugal estimate of 10 dollars per person an hour and 24 work hours per year. In reality, Jason and I work close to 40 hours a month to keep this fine site running. Let's put it this way, if I were running this site for my on-the-side consulting business, I'd be charging 40 hours at 50 dollars an hour. However, we do this because we love the chassis, and we love the community around it.
To clear up any questions about the ads, they've so far only generated about 50 dollars a year in revenue that goes directly towards paying for the servers. At our current costs, that's only about a month and a half of costs per year that are recovered via the ads. I've decided to remove them due to the lack of revenue generated from them. Once I receive the next deposit from Google, they will be going away.I don't ask for the maintenance dollar amount to factor into your decision of how much to donate, I just ask that you take it into account when you decide whether to donate or not towards the other portions.
If you'd like to donate, please send PayPal donations to clubs12admin@gmail.com. Please include a comment on your donation that includes this post title, so Jason and I know whether this post helped increase donations.Thank you for your time,
Ben M.
Club-S12 Site Admin.