Hello,
No, I am not going to donate or take off my ad-blocker, sorry, but can we get more information on how the costs are so much, "several hundred pounds a year." Like, how many servers do you actually have or are there some kind of extra thingies you put your money into? I found a site where you can have an LFS server with 24/7 support, fast pings, easy management and whatever for 1 euro a month (that's about £0.87). I don't want to question what you want to do, but maybe it could be of use to the actual people who'd be donating money to your servers.
Just 'cause you found one site that is cheap doesn't mean it is reliable or have good support, this can cause problems. Even with your cheap server it would cost around €70 each year for the LFS servers, then, you have the website, this is hard to calculate, this could be really cheap, if not free but it could be expensive. Lets say it was expensive, €4 a month (yeah that is pretty expensive but i looked at a few website hosters on the web and a couple of them wanted that much) so, €48 for that. €118 converts to £102 so not quite a couple hundred, but, still pretty expensive. I myself won't be paying for the donation packs but i will not get an adblocker.
Hello, k_badam, and thank you for your so enthusiastic interest in this matter. May we still wait for the head of TC to eventually address themselves to this question.
Let me do the rundown on "why" they say it costs hundreds of pounds every year to run [TC]. I'll go with the costs of running Street Obsessions because yes, even an affiliate team has expenses.
(All prices are USD)
Domain Name: 15.50$
Hosting: 67.50$ (That's for a basic 3GB hosting package with PHP support, 60GB/month)
LFS Server: 24$ (12 spots, no Insim support)
Total: 107$
So, if we do a simple upscaling of needs for TC:
Domain Name: 15.50$
Hosting: 240$ (Upgraded from 60Gb/Month to 250GB)
LFS Servers: 96$ (4 Servers)
Total: 351.50$
It's easy to add up to hundreds every year. Especially when you need somewhat big bandwith to withstand a pretty busy forum.
Sebas explained it quite nicely although it would be a little higher if you included the teamspeak. I think TC have multiple domains too.
just ingore what i said, i have never hosted a server or a website in my life so im not the person to be responding....
(2016-09-26 17:44)Nismo Wrote: [ -> ]Sebas explained it quite nicely although it would be a little higher if you included the teamspeak. I think TC have multiple domains too.
Indeed. You can also add the Minecraft server they had a while ago.
And Multiple Domains.
And TeamSpeak.
And other hidden costs.
We could also talk about how much time the admins do take to manage the server, come up with new ideas, create new stuff for the insim, etc.. This might not be "tangible" money but they still do that on their own for free.
Isn't it possible to find cheaper hosting elsewhere?
I can't get my head around why all of a sudden we're being asked to fund it when its been free for all these years. I know I'll probably get shot down for my opinion but its how I feel.
(2016-09-26 17:37)Sebas Wrote: [ -> ]LFS Servers: 96$ (4 Servers)
And remember when we had 5 servers (TC city driving 1,2,3 + racing + training).
I dont mind to pay for something that I play lot of hours if the quality will be better, cause we're getting servers and web off to much times, high pings,... the quality of servers have decreased on the past months,...
(2016-09-26 17:56)Rossi Wrote: [ -> ]I can't get my head around why all of a sudden we're being asked to fund it when its been free for all these years.
And it's still free. They've always asked people to donate to help keep everything up and running. The only change now is that they have changed their strategy to go about it, because the previous one (without rewards and ads) wasn't working.
It's up to you whether you want to donate or not.
Which, in my opinion, is something I highly recommend if you can find the money.
(2016-09-26 18:09)KaraK Wrote: [ -> ]And it's still free. They've always asked people to donate to help keep everything up and running. The only change now is that they have changed their strategy to go about it, because the previous one (without rewards and ads) wasn't working.
It's up to you whether you want to donate or not.
Which, in my opinion, is something I highly recommend if you can find the money.
I'm aware its still free, but what if not enough people donate, then what? it closes? and the people that have donated have lost out?
Its OK to say that the money is for domain renewal and server rental but can these things not be found cheaper elsewhere? Domains aren't particularly expensive especially co.uk.
I think the majority of the costs are on server rentals. Do you really need so many LFS servers running? Could you not downgrade the TS server? Just ideas.