• Hi Max,

    I think the team should be more transparent about exact funding needs. I typed up a slightly longer message suggesting a need for specific funding goals, but then noticed there is in fact an exact number listed on the donations page. With that said, only people already willing to donate will be clicking on the donations page to notice that. Perhaps an explanation of exactly how much money is needed and where it is going in a post like this would be valuable. Everyone checks recent threads, few will check the donations page.

    If this site is self-hosted, where are our donations going? To power costs? Internet? Let us know.

  • Hey hey all :)

    The monthly breakdown is as follows:

    * € 10 - Main cost for the server that is running our site
    * € 2 - Cost for snapshots (backups) of our server, occuring about once a week
    * € 3 - VAT for the server + snapshots
    * € 2 - Domain costs
    * € 10 - Costs for our backup server that makes daily backups of our site + database
    * € 2 - VAT for the backup server
    * € 5 - Extra bandwith costs (variable) (mostly traffic between backup server and main server)

    That brings us to about €30 a month for hosting costs alone.

    The other €10 is mainly used for transaction costs that are billed to us when a donation is made (unfortunately, we have to pay a chunk of each donation).
    If we get 10 donations of €3, that means we won't get €30 but about €25-€27.
    The rest of this is used as a net to cover unexpected costs, chargebacks (a chargeback always costs us €15), a rainy day fund and to allow us to organize contests with cool prizes.

    My ultimate goal is to have an extra server ready as well, so that when our server would go down, we still wouldn't have downtime because of our secondary server. That's however not feasible for me to pay right now.

    These costs are actually very low for a VPS that we're running on and that is because I am managing it completely myself. Managed hosting easily costs 3-5 times more.