I hate writing about this stuff. Trust me...I wish we could just keep this website full of pictures of people building blocky penises and stuff, but let's drop it down to real talk.
The server isn't super expensive, but it is costly. Way way back when we were hosted by a company called Servercraft, who by and large had 8/10 service, with like 3/10 management tools. The lag wasn't too bad and we had a ton of storage...it's just our hands were tied a lot to fix things due to their limited interface. That cost us $45 a month. While we got donations, and we "get" ad revenue from here (they only pay out $100 at a time...we're at like $65 for all time), for the first long time IMGArY ate all the costs, and since then I did. And for sure, I don't mind it, to be fully honest my wife and I are getting ready to sell our house and buy a new one so I'd love to cut costs, but I'm not starving paying for this now.
So we looked into some ways to cut costs. When servercraft finally crapped out for the last time, I hosted it from my house for a while. It ran fine, was hosted more purely (we had fine-tuned control of things), but it lagged for some people. Also, comcast started throttling me so netflix got slow...so it was not a long term solution.
We decided to switch to a VPS (a blank server hosted by someone else) and brought cncr04s in as owner, since he has tons of experience with VPS's. And the one we chose meets the minimum specs we use, for $30 bucks a month, which is great.
But it isn't that great. We get what we pay for...this server lags a lot. Cnc has diagnosed it as a combination of RAM problems, CPU time problems, and network problems. Basically, this server doesn't perform fully up to the specs it was advertised as all the time. It's pretty good, and the price can't be beat, but it's really not great.
I think everyone would agree we would be better served moving to a better server package, possibly with some other host. But it's not that easy. Let's say for SOLID guaranteed hosting...we should budget for like $60 a month. Great...I can't do that right now. And the problem with moving to more expensive hosting is, I would be eating the cost and just hoping donations rolled in to offset that cost. Do that math...it would be like $720 a year.
IMGArY and I will never recoup the back costs of running this server...and I can't speak for him, but I don't want to, I love playing and it was worth it. But, if we wanna up our hosting plan, I can't eat that cost myself. So here's what I'm asking...Playing will always be free and donations will NEVER be required, but if we set up $5 recurring paypal donations, would you sign up for that? If we knew we had, say, 12 people willing to do that a month...that covers a $60/month plan. I wanna get a feeler out there to see what our options would be moving forward and what we could possibly do.
If you take this poll, please direct other ppl here to take it too!
[poll id="17"]
