Regarding Donations...

[Willchill]

Good Evening/Afternoon/Morning/Night!

I'm here to question the legitimacy of the donation system this community uses and to perhaps help the community find better ways to spend its money, so pull up a chair and, perhaps most importantly -

Things could get out of hand. Please try to remain on topic and respectful in the replies. Thank you! :) Now, onto the reason I created this thread.


After discussion with other members, we realised that the clearest explanation we've gotten is "our servers are hosted in a German datacentre," and that the expenditure of the community's donations has also never been explained properly. This isn't so bad on its own, but when I can create a $72 / month alternative way of getting the same stuff we have currently, things start to look a bit crooked. Note this includes paying initially for XenForo (the forum software) and the extension XenForo Media Gallery over a 12 month period. After the initial payment it is much cheaper.

I'll be choosing the 12-month options because of XenForo and it's just silly to pay monthly with the activity the forums and servers have.


$55.68 a month for hosting.

Here is a run-down of the cost of hosting equivalent to what is currently used within the community. The community does actually use the hosting / domain site, though I'm not sure what aspect of it. I know this because the forums redirected there a few days ago.

Add on the INITIAL cost of XenForo. (It is $200 to buy a 12 month license. Once that expires it costs $65 to renew.) Note, this doesn't include setup or XenForo Enhanced Search, which I don't think we do use or require. It also doesn't include the cost of a forum theme because we don't necessarily need to be buying one. There are plenty of attractive, free themes.

After the cost of XenForo, we come to $72.35 per month. Slap on an extra $5 for taxes and currency conversion and stuff and we're all set.

Apis Networks - site hosting and domain registration
Xenforo - forum software. I included the license and Media Gallery.
HostHorde - Minecraft hosting

So, why are we spending almost $50 a month ($600 a year!) more than we really need to be? I'd love to know where our donations really go.

Cheers,
Will. :^)

NOTE: This is a COMMUNITY ISSUE, and thus wasn't sent to admins as a PM.

 

[tnm]

You've got to bear in mind that the minecraft server hosting company you listed there is just for one server- we actually hire a dedicated server which allows us to have multiple servers, schematic downloads and the like. If we went down the route of that server hosting, we'd basically just be stuck with one minecraft server and no options of event servers or similar. As you can understand, this significantly bumps up the cost, although we're currently looking into alternatives and how we can reduce it.

 

[GmK]

Webhosting =/= Game server hosting.

We don't even take the donations for the cost of monthly webhosting and xenforo, that is all paid by Malcovent out of his own pocket (those 55 USD you state, but I must admit, I don't know that exact amount Malco pays monthly.)

The dedicated server costs the current 120USD. If you find me a dedicated, powerful, 64GB, 1000mbit, i7 core, ddos protected, etc yadda yadda, dedicated server with a reliable (!) host (1hr support at any time, 99% uptime guarantee, etc.), that manages to run 5 minecraft server instance, teamspeak, garrys mod, and whatnot, for a cheap price, let us know.

But- we will have some news concerning that soon as well.

(and if you really wanna know: The dedi costs 99EUR currently, that is 112USD converted. PayPal takes away 1-2 USD per donation as a fee. This leads to me taking over the potentially missing few USD each month. We do not run any kind of profit generating machine here. We got the dedi price down to those 99EUR a short while ago and immediately decreased the monthly donation amount to show that. We don't ask people to also chip in for the webhosting and xenforo licensing costs. The last months, when donations didn't fill, Malcovent and Baker and I paid for the rest. At no point has anyone ever gotten any gain from this, luckily - since that would create an issue just as you say. When we did have some overspill, we invested it into increasing the data throuput in the dedi (that shit costs, unfortunately) or back then buying minecraft voucher codes to use for giveaways/competitions, or save towards the new xenforo updates (those can cost) or e.g. the new forum theme (those can cost as well))

 

[Willchill]

Webhosting =/= Game server hosting.

We don't even take the donations for the cost of monthly webhosting and xenforo, that is all paid by Malcovent out of his own pocket (those 55 USD you state)

The dedicated server costs the current 120USD. If you find me a dedicated, powerful, 64GB, 1000mbit, i7 core, etc yadda yadda, dedicated server with a reliable (!) host, that manages to run 5 minecraft server instance, teamspeak, garrys mod, and whatnot, for a cheap price, let us know.

But- we will have some news concerning that soon as well.

Is it too much to run the forums alongside the games?

 

[GmK]

Is it too much to run the forums alongside the games?

A dedicated server is not useful for running a complete web installation, that poses a security risk and leaves us at the risk of downtime. There is a good reason to keep them separated. And - it would not reduce the donation amount anyhow, so why bother?

Like I said, we will have news concerning the costing and server structure soon, what I can say is, that we won't be requiring the 120 USD for much longer.

 

[Malcovent]

Any further queries, Willchill ?

 

[Willchill]

Any further queries, Willchill ?

Nope. It's all been cleared up, thanks to the quick and clear response from GmK.