Hi Everyone, Just wanted to let you all know that our hosting provider is nearly doubling their price from $24/month to $41/month. As many of you know, I've paid for this site's hosting, domain services and software updates for many years. It's not really about the money, but I having the price doubled and having to pay nearly $500/year has irritated me and I don't want to let the hosting provider get away with that. As I see it there are a few options 1. We can do nothing and keep on keeping on... 1a, We can go all PBS and solicit contributions from our members--if we did this, I would insist on 100% transparency and every dollar contributed would be accounted for and go to DSP expenses. Everyone would know exactly where their money went. This sucks because I don't really like asking for money, and I don't really like the extra work of publishing the financials, but am willing to do it. Overall, expenses for DSP are about $525/year. 2. We can try to switch to a cheaper plan (cloud vs managed vps) on the same hosting provider. This might be completely transparent, but I'm having trouble getting a straight answer on whether their (much cheaper) cloud services are managed or not. 3. We can switch to an unmanaged service, which are usually much cheaper. The downside is someone would have to actively manage the server (server maintenance, software updates, etc.). I really don't want to deal with any of that. 3. We can switch providers. We could probably find a managed vps at another provider back in the $25/month range, but we'd have to move DSP to another provider. That's a few hours/days worth of work, and well, I'm lazy and don't want to do it. I'm open to any other suggestions from you guys. -Craig
I would not mind contributing and keeping the site as it is. Much love to you guys for keeping the site going
I’m down to Venmo or PayPal some money. I will be contributing $1 more than @BlueMouse, as I am a better person than he is.
Lol. Thank you for all you do....let me know what payment method works best....I usually use Google Wallet.
I vote for 1c. I don't like all that transparency funny business. If you ask the folks for money they will send you money. In fact you should ask for a set amount that would go towards hiring a code monkey to put a fresh coat of lipstick on this thing. So we need 500 bucks for next year of service. Pay it all up front and offer them 300 dollars. Or we take our business elsewhere. They will take the 300 happily. And then we are back square. Use the 200 remaining for a tech. C'mon folks line up the cash. Besides Andrew gonna hook us up next year. And it's not like y'all gonna be spending a lot of money at dodger games anymore. BTW.... I'm working on live lair events. In Arcadia. I should stop talking.
We should just put together an annual dues for those who have been here for a bunch of years. If we get new members, they can ride for free until they have been around for a while and become vested and want to help out. We have enough guys that are here every day and been around long enough to want to keep DSP running. Shouldn’t be an issue for us to pony up 35 each every year to keep our internet home open! Not sure exactly how many of us there are but we can get a group together that funds this shit. It only takes 15 of us at 35 a pop.
Dues sounds too much like past due and that's bad news. I think we should put up the goal for the year of service and have folk pledge an amount to try and help reach the goal. The pledges could be privately sent to Craig and he can update the goal until we reach it. I'll pledge fifty bucks from the bag I have from the last time folks sent money in. :eating:utthewindow:
