Perhaps a valid option would be renting the $30-40/month server for a few months to make sure that it is what we want, and then perhaps attempting to raise the two year fee from donations a few months in.
I'd gladly throw $20 in every once in a while to fund my hobby, and I'm sure many others would do the same. Paypal is probably convenient for most people.
The user database will probably only expand with the development of new emulators, so I don't think lack of motivation by players to keep the site funded will be an an issue in the foreseeable future.
I'd like to thank those taking the initiative to make this transition for TASVideos, there aren't exactly a lot of people capable of doing so.
My company just bought a new server so we will have the old one doing nothing, the housing is already paid for the other servers, the only real cost would be the bandwidth required, the hosting/housing company sells this in 64kb increments, although I do not know the price at the moment, also the price for a dedicated ip since ours are in use. I could talk so they lend the server while it isn't used for a fee, it is windows though.
Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player
(3600)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4739
Location: Tennessee
Update:
Nach and I have decided on a good dedicated server that will meet the demands of the site. However, it will cost a monthly fee. In order to make this happen, we will need an initial sum of money.
As Bisqwit has made quite clear, this transition needs to happen soon in order to avoid TASvideos crashing and burning.
So I am asking all those who are willing to donate, to go ahead and do so, in order to get this process going.
I will be collecting the donations, and can be paypal'ed using andres.delikat@gmail.com. If you perfer other method of contributing, you can PM me.
I hate having to make a post that involves asking money from people, as that very much against my personality. However, the idea of this community falling aparts pains me greatly. Let's fight to keep it alive!
Can you let us know how much money is needed at the start, and on an ongoing basis? That would help people figure out what an appropriate donation (given their personal resources) would be.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player
(3600)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4739
Location: Tennessee
Derakon wrote:
Can you let us know how much money is needed at the start, and on an ongoing basis? That would help people figure out what an appropriate donation (given their personal resources) would be.
That's a hard question to answer since I can't really guage what I will get on a reliable basis. I'd say if several people contributed monthly regularly, it would only need to be like $5-$10. Right now it would be quicker & cheaper if people can lump a few months in at once right away.
OmnipotentEntity wrote:
Dedicated servers from a reputable renter are generally between $100-$200 for a low-mid range unit. per month.
Well, with Nach's ingenuity, trimming some fat, & some deals, we will get something cheaper than this range.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
adelikat wrote:
OmnipotentEntity wrote:
Dedicated servers from a reputable renter are generally between $100-$200 for a low-mid range unit. per month.
Well, with Nach's ingenuity, trimming some fat, & some deals, we will get something cheaper than this range.
Just to clarify, it's not a "dedicated" server. It's a really powerful server shared between 15 or 20 other users, but guaranteed a nice chunk.
Hopefully, when trimming some fat, we'll get TASVideos working with less. Just hope we have room to grow.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Dedicated servers from a reputable renter are generally between $100-$200 for a low-mid range unit. per month.
Well, with Nach's ingenuity, trimming some fat, & some deals, we will get something cheaper than this range.
Just to clarify, it's not a "dedicated" server. It's a really powerful server shared between 15 or 20 other users, but guaranteed a nice chunk.
Hopefully, when trimming some fat, we'll get TASVideos working with less. Just hope we have room to grow.
If that's the case then I already have a server rented that you can use. I've already paid for a year and I'm not doing anything with it. :/
Build a man a fire, warm him for a day,
Set a man on fire, warm him for the rest of his life.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
OmnipotentEntity wrote:
Nach wrote:
adelikat wrote:
OmnipotentEntity wrote:
Dedicated servers from a reputable renter are generally between $100-$200 for a low-mid range unit. per month.
Well, with Nach's ingenuity, trimming some fat, & some deals, we will get something cheaper than this range.
Just to clarify, it's not a "dedicated" server. It's a really powerful server shared between 15 or 20 other users, but guaranteed a nice chunk.
Hopefully, when trimming some fat, we'll get TASVideos working with less. Just hope we have room to grow.
If that's the case then I already have a server rented that you can use. I've already paid for a year and I'm not doing anything with it. :/
Can we have some details?
Who is the hosting company?
How much HD space?
How much RAM?
How much bandwidth?
Which OS? (name the distro)
Can we run a torrent tracker on it?
Root login?
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Dreamhost
"enough" (df says I have 2.7TB)
150 MB (but that can be changed up)
"enough" (read Dreamhost ToS)
debian
don't know about that.
and I don't think so.
Build a man a fire, warm him for a day,
Set a man on fire, warm him for the rest of his life.
eEccelerator dependency --definitely the largest hurdle for installing a PHP version that can run the site -- has been removed. Manual compilation of stuff no longer required at least on Debian squeeze/sid.
Additionally, now it also supports XCache.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
OmnipotentEntity wrote:
Dreamhost
"enough" (df says I have 2.7TB)
150 MB (but that can be changed up)
"enough" (read Dreamhost ToS)
debian
don't know about that.
and I don't think so.
Yeah, I don't believe Dreamhost would cut it based on what I read from their website.
Bisqwit wrote:
eEccelerator dependency --definitely the largest hurdle for installing a PHP version that can run the site -- has been removed. Manual compilation of stuff no longer required at least on Debian squeeze/sid.
Additionally, now it also supports XCache.
Excellent :D
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Well shit, if you guys already have it all set up, I can just dump it on my DreamHost account, give you guys FTP+SSH access, and call it a day. No need to go getting another account, but if you're honestly intensive about getting your own account, I could give you a custom discount code too.
Just throwing that out there. I've had my account now for about 1 1/2 years and it has unlimited bandwidth/HDD space, so... we also joined the beta service they had when they first offered it, and since then our server has literally been up about 99.99% of the time -- the other 0.01% was when I was doing some really nasty database work (like deleting 400+ MB of old content...)
(Edit: Also, I find it hard to believe that this site can be that intensive. It's just a Wiki, a lot of images, and some forum things; and the tracker/etc things are externalized to other servers afaik anyway, so no problem.)
(Edit 0: While I have had my personal fallouts regarding this site with adelikat and to a lesser extent mmbossman, I still hold Bisqwit in highest regards, and you have my word that I would not interfere with the operations of this site excepting a time-critical crash, hacking, or any other things that would jeoparize the running of this site.)
(Edit 2: If you don't believe it would work, why not throw up a test copy? I can set up a side-domain for it + database and get whatever access needs set up for testing sometime later today.)
Edit 3:
September 2008
2691271 total hits
36938445 total kB files
92639 total unique sites
3737 average hits per hour
56.78% ratio of Mozilla family hits
24.60% ratio of IE family hits (15.34% MSIE 7, 8.46% MSIE 6)
5.11% ratio of Opera family hits
As an example, Jul (my hosted forum) currently ges about ~833 hits/hour. Despite this, hilariously unoptimized page generation still doesn't even faze the server. So something like that would probably work.
(Other stat: Total bandwidth/month: ~14 GB total across all of rustedlogic.net.)
I didn't read the whole thread, just an idea, but instead of google adsense, shouldn't we try to have more specialized ads ? like consoleSource, gamersection, and any other website that would give us more for an Ads on a gaming site and forums ? It would be easier to find like 100$ per month that way.
And you couldn't have a more targeted viewer than a website about video game.
It's great to see everyone willing to help out!
I have a thought about the donations. I think that they should be listed somewhere on the site, along with the expenses/bills payed.
It's not that I don't specifically trust adelikat or whoever ends up running the finances - actually I don't trust anyone with handling money without some sort of control system. And I think more people are like that.
By listing the donations and expenses somewhere on the site, people can hopefully feel a little more secure in sending their money to someone on the internet they have never met.
Hopefully this can be done somewhat automatically.
By listing the donations and expenses somewhere on the site, people can hopefully feel a little more secure in sending their money to someone on the internet they have never met.
...
I already do something similar (see the bottom of Jul.) It's not exactly an easily automated process (how many things do you know of that allow you to check account balances, for obvious reasons) ... but it works.
Emulator Coder, Site Developer, Site Owner, Expert player
(3600)
Joined: 11/3/2004
Posts: 4739
Location: Tennessee
Ok, I guess it is time to update the status of this situation. We have bought a server and began the process of transferring TASVideos!
Here is the current cost/donation information:
12 months paid in advance: $340.54 (10% discount compared to the usual $29.95)
Contriubtions so far:
$250 by Anon. *
$100 by adelikat
$60 by Anon.
$40 by Anon
$60 by Bisqwit
$50 by Anon
$40 by Anon
$30 by Anon
$30 by Tombad
$10.28 by BadPotato
Total: 670.28
-340.54 12 months paid
- 2.64 paypal transaction fees
Balance: 327.10
*Pending transaction, done by mail, won't receive the check until Monday-ish
All contributions are anonymous until the doners specifically tell me they don't might it being public (1 person has specifically requested it to remain anon.)
The balance will be put in an interest bearing account to only be used for operational costs (monthly fees after the first year, domain registration, etc).
The contributions so far have been awesome. I can't think you guys enough. TASVideos really needed some folks to step up in order to stay alive, and we came through. TASVideos is now secure for 1 year minimum.
The server costs is still tentative. We have a 30 days cancellation and going on an assumption that we will be able to optimize ram consumption enough to meet our ram limit. If not, we are looking at another upgrade which bumps our monthly fee a good bit.
I'll keep everyone up to date on future changes.
Once the site is transerred, I will find an easy method of keeping the site budge status public and up to date.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
adelikat wrote:
I can't think you guys enough.
Yeah, I don't think about them either, too painful.
Current status is that we copied over the main code, and got a duplicate site up and running. Bisqwit has very kindly been hard and work improving things to be more compatible than the type of dedicated servers he's been running it on till now.
However, as it stands, parts of the sites can't load within the current server limitations, we hope to cut it down more. Once we have everything working, we hope to perform the transfer. No ETA yet however.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Nice work at setting it up so quickly.
I'm currently unemployed (and besides, I already donated to another website a few days ago so I'm completely broke now), but I will donate something eventually, I see you're good to go for approximately one year by now, so there's no rush, let me find a new job first :P
...
I already do something similar (see the bottom of Jul.) It's not exactly an easily automated process (how many things do you know of that allow you to check account balances, for obvious reasons) ... but it works.
