Statement regarding our new funding strategy.

[[TC]»Pete«]

This thread is in response to this thread: http://forum.city-driving.co.uk/showthre...?tid=23959

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Warped Wrote:No, I am not going to donate or take off my adblocker [...]

Ok, that's fine, no one is forcing you to do either of those things. Also, the nature of donations is that they are voluntary.

Warped Wrote:[...] 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 is 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).

We do not just run an LFS server, we run a large, complex system which requires powerful hardware. I won't disclose the fine details of our servers but I can give you a quick overview.

The sites you're thinking of that charge €1 per month for a server do not offer anything close to what is required to run what we currently provide for our community. We use dedicated servers to run:

• LFS servers (currently between 6 and 9)
• 3 custom InSim applications
• Multiple statistics applications
• Multiple websites (including the forum)
• Multiple databases (Several GB total)
• Teamspeak Server
• Other misc applications, maintenance scripts etc.
• Plus Domains (4)

Our servers are in an A* data centre with business grade network protection including DDoS mitigation which altogether costs a non-trivial amount of money.
Plus, of course, we have backups stored in a geographically seperate datacentre, without which the less than 6 hours of downtime we had recently due to a hardware failure would have lasted several days.
Many of the above require full, root access to a real server. And, most importantly, we have full control of our data and custom software.

To give you an idea of our server requirements, our forum alone registers around half a million page requests every month and the bandwidth consumption of our server is around a terabyte (~1.0TB) per month of traffic alone. At busy times (eg. Gumball) it is much, much more.

We are not here to make a profit, we're here to make sure we can continue providing high quality services for our community.

Although we have been receiving donations for many years, they have left great gaps in the financing which were covered by certain members of the community over and over again. Probably about half the costs over the years have been paid for by [TC] members, who also put a lot of time and effort in to administrate the servers. You will agree that this seems a little unfair. Rest assured that this will be the case in the future if it is needed but now we are asking the community to help out so that we can distribute the weight to many shoulders rather than just a couple. The easiest and simplest way to do this is by removing your ad-blocker. Even if you don't click the adverts, you're still helping.

If you still don't like having ads, you can remove them for £5/year. When we came up with the numbers for our supporter initiative we felt that £5/year was more than reasonable for the worth of the [TC] experience, especially for those who spend many hours every week playing on our servers.

If you really must use an ad-blocker, do so, just don't whine about it.

Pete, Elmo, Chuck & the [TC] team.

Edit: Forgot the domains. ~Elmo