Only recently has the cost of the master server been added to this donation fund, prior for 5 years it was being paid by a developer Ancientman if we haven't got the MS then we can't play. I know to some it may seem a lot of cash but there was a big clean up a while ago with one of the goals being value for money.
I will donate 10 now to get the chart of that awful 0.
SourceAs I mentioned last week, donations at the moment only pay for our website, and some other behind the scenes things like our repositories. There are two servers that cost us $319 USD / month, and the donations pay for these. On top of this, I have my own server, which provides services such as our build server, test server, file hosting, project management tools, mumble, PRSPY, various utility scripts, and up until yesterday, the master server. This costs me $99 USD / month, which I pay for out of my own pocket, and have done so for the last 5 years or so. There is also a CDN which I also pay for which hosts some critical things, but that's like $2 / month, so it's not really worth mentioning.
Anyway, for those who know how much these sorts of things cost, it's clear our costs are way over the top, over $400 / month, and for the last 3 years or so we've been trying to consolidate servers and reduce our costs. Unfortunately, our web admins have been pretty inactive, and haven't been able to get anything done about it.
So instead of waiting for the web admins, we are now actively working (over the next few weeks) to just get this done already. It's been pushed back and back, and with all these attacks it's finally pushed us over the edge where we can't deal with it anymore.
Unfortunately, issues like inactivity are a common part of working on a volunteer mod development team, where you don't get paid and you work in your free time. We just have to deal with it and try to overcome any issues that may arise.
So, we are purchasing new infrastructure to handle all our use cases, consolidate all our over-priced servers, and avoid the need for developers to pay out of their own pockets.
So how much will these new servers cost?
Our new planned server infrastructure will cost us less than $200 / month, for everything, which is quite a large difference. Over the next month or two, we will also be sorting out donations to make sure it covers everything properly, unlike before (it takes time to deal with this sort of thing properly, it's not something we can just flick a switch on). Our current donation goal of $250 / month will likely stay as is, so we can cover months with reduced income.
For those wanting to donate now, please hold onto your money for the time being. We will let you know when donations are going to the things you want to pay for. Since remedied this was in February
Another bonus of the new infrastructure will be multiple people having appropriate levels of access, so we don't run into a situation like last week where we can't do anything because certain people aren't responding.
Every little bit helps! Maybe when AM has some more time available he can provide with another update.
. Hoping there's some generous people still out there to keep things going.
