First I would like to say, that you guys all ROCK! We have had many very generous donations, in quantity and donation amount, and I cannot thank you enough! In case you are just hearing about donations, info can be found HERE.
Foxtrot (for years) and myself (since the great crash) have been covering operating expenses. Unfortunately we need new equipment; we just don't have spares that are powerful enough or good upgrade alternatives for the current stuff. The improvements will be substantial in both reliability, disaster recovery and speed.
We upgraded the leased server (1/2 of the hosting for the site) a couple of months back to improve these pieces. Of course with that came the increased costs. The donations thus far have already paid the lease bill due and pre-paid through the end of October, so that is awesome!
We want to get out of the leased game. I operate several racks at local data-centers that I am happy to donate space in. The current clients I have there pay the costs, so I am happy to donate 1/30th of that space to the site. Unfortunately donating a $2,500 server hardware setup is a bit harder for me to swing.
Now that we have covered the leased server until Nov. 1st, the primary goal is for this site to own its very own server that can go into one of my data-center racks and have the upkeep fees mostly covered for many years to come. This server will provide 2/3 - 3/4 of the total serving power for the site. We will still have a backup mirror in place to handle a small amount of the traffic regularly and ready to take over if the primary fails.
We want to get something that is a bit future proof, and is upgrade-able after that. Between what I have currently to donate, and what have found shopping the deal, the current Ideal setup in mind (for nerds here) is a server with redundant power supplies, hardware RAID 1 with hot-spare, 8Core processor (with a slot for an additional 8 core processor) and 16GB RAM (expansible to 256GB) and remote IPMI management interface.
To acquire the parts still needed with what I have already acquired on my own or had from other projects, we need just short of $1700. We have $1115.xx right now, with some money in the mail too. When we get close enough, I will donate the remaining funds to make it happen. The goal is to stop paying $150 monthly and have it paid off.
After that is done, we have one more project, which may need additional funding, or may not.
The forum software we use (vBulletin 3.7) is very outdated. We have to patch it constantly because it was designed to run on the PHP software versions from many years ago. We have tried on the next newer version and it completely fails. To add to that, the version we have has a massive memory leak that is one of the largest contributing factors we have had to the minor outages you have seen since the great crash.
We must find something new. We, the staff, are reviewing our options for the best course of action, and will likely come to you all, the members, when we have it narrowed down a bit more. Unfortunately vBulletin's newest version, vB5 Connect, is trying to be a private facebook software rather than a forum. We haven't eliminated it from the list, as we hope there will be options to make it behave more like a traditional forum than a social network. However, we are reviewing and doing trial testing on 4 additional software packages to be prepared, most of these cost money, a couple do not. Luckily, even those that do cost money are significantly less cost than the hardware to run the site, so they will be much easier.
So again, thank you for all of your generosity. We will keep you updated on the efforts as they transpire. We are setting this site up to be a long-term self-sustained community, which is something we can all be proud of.
Sincerely,
--J
