Autoshite forum funding

[808 Estate]

Done. Cheers.

[Pat Earrings]

Did mine a couple days ago 👍

[Talbot]

Having left the fundraiser open for a couple of days, we have now covered the hosting costs for February, and have £138.85 held in the kitty.  This will likely cover March, April and a bit of May, so I will not need to raise funds again until the end of May/beginning of June, 3 months away.  There will likely be forum software costs in a month or so too, but I'll deal with that when it occurs.

Many thanks to all who have contributed.

[Talbot]

March's costs came to £80.48, which represents a fairly significant hike in prices.  With £138.85 held previously, that became £58.37 left in the kitty.

April's costs came to £78.30, indicating that March wasn't just a one-off, prices really have gone up.    From the previous £58.37, that leaves the kitty rather inside-out at (£19.93)

We've always known that our current host was on the expensive side, but this has now meant that costs have gone up from under £50/month to around £80/month, which is a rather nasty increase.  Over the year that's a grand on hosting, which is rather too much in my opinion, hence I am now looking to see if there is anywhere else we can host the forum.  As there are plenty of people on here who have experience of using webhosting etc. I am looking for recommendations. 

Please, no "how about x company?" type replies... I can google just fine.   I'm looking for people who actually have experience of using a service, how well it works in reality, and how expensive it is in reality.   Given that the last webhosting I bought (granted, over 15 years ago) cost £5.99/month, £80 seems like a rather large pill to swallow.  Hence looking to see what's available.

I'm also opening up the forum funding request again, as I could probably do with replenishing the kitty somewhat.  So, as ever:

The fundraiser can be found here:

https://ko-fi.com/autoshite

Unfortunately, despite KoFi being superbly easy to use, when it transfers balance to Paypal, it's considered a business transaction, so some fees are lost.  On the back of that, if anyone wishes to make a "friends and family" paypal payment directly into the Autoshite Paypal account, that would be most welcomed.  The email address to make a payment to is

[email protected]

However, for anyone making a payment by anything other than paypal, or indeed would prefer not to use friends&family to make the payment that is no issue at all and payments through KoFi are very welcome indeed.  Sending direct by Paypal friends&family is absolutely optional.  But is also welcomed to avoid fees.

I will, as before, leave this open for a while, to allow everyone who uses the forum to see this and contribute if they wish.  With luck, this will again cover the next 3 months or so, and we can get an alternative and somewhat less expensive provider sorted.

The explanation for the weird email address being above/on the previous page.

Many thanks.

[AnnoyingPentium]

Little bit sent as I'm not paid until tomorrow.

[grogee]

I've shat out a fiscal deposit via PayPal. Long live Autoshite

[Cookiesouwest]

Contribution sent by PP F&F

[Wibble]

Contribution sent by PP👍

[Longbridge Apologist]

Have sent an amount equal* to the worth of my premium* Bavarian Sierra.

[Macscrooge]

Colossal* sum sent by PayPal. 

[Dabooka]

Done, Paypal F&F 👍

[tobyd]

5 hours ago, Talbot said:

We've always known that our current host was on the expensive side, but this has now meant that costs have gone up from under £50/month to around £80/month, which is a rather nasty increase.  Over the year that's a grand on hosting, which is rather too much in my opinion, hence I am now looking to see if there is anywhere else we can host the forum.  As there are plenty of people on here who have experience of using webhosting etc. I am looking for recommendations. 

Please, no "how about x company?" type replies... I can google just fine.   I'm looking for people who actually have experience of using a service, how well it works in reality, and how expensive it is in reality.   Given that the last webhosting I bought (granted, over 15 years ago) cost £5.99/month, £80 seems like a rather large pill to swallow.  Hence looking to see what's available.

I'm not sure I agree with this - they were specificially chosen because £50 a month for the spec of machine and backup of the entire site and its content to another country (in case the datacenter burnt down) was a total steal at that price. They've since bought their prices inline with most of their competitors but gave a years grace to their existing customers so this increase should not have been news to you or any of the administrators.

You might want to consider having Invision themselves host the site (currently $89/mo) - I can't tell if that offering does everything you currently have but you could ask them - this might also include the software license cost. I don't think you'll be able to get this site to run on a cheapo (£5.99/mo) webhost designed for peoples unread blogs or local interest websites written in Word '97 because they don't offer you full access to the underlying VM or have limits that the size of AS exceeds.

All the smaller cloud hosts (Linode, Hetzner, OVH, whoever), as you currently use, are priced about the same. The larger ones (AWS, Azure) are all more expensive.

[Carl1981]

Contribution made, PayPal F&F

[Dan29]

Ditto

[St.Jude]

Donated, for the first time ever as I've managed to find it before the donation window closed.

13 hours ago, Talbot said:

We've always known that our current host was on the expensive side, but this has now meant that costs have gone up from under £50/month to around £80/month, which is a rather nasty increase.  Over the year that's a grand on hosting, which is rather too much in my opinion, hence I am now looking to see if there is anywhere else we can host the forum.  As there are plenty of people on here who have experience of using webhosting etc. I am looking for recommendations. 

Please, no "how about x company?" type replies... I can google just fine.   I'm looking for people who actually have experience of using a service, how well it works in reality, and how expensive it is in reality.   Given that the last webhosting I bought (granted, over 15 years ago) cost £5.99/month, £80 seems like a rather large pill to swallow.  Hence looking to see what's available.

I've ran sites across Digital Ocean, Vultr and Linode before, I always tend to plum for Linode. I've had to use DO's customer service before and it was shocking. They're not the helpful company they once were. Vultr are just anonymous, neither good nor bad. Linode though tend to be fairly helpful when needed, although I don't tend to need them often. And this is the issue, how much of the site's maintenance and administration is done by you and how much do we outsource to the provider? As I know where I work the marketing team pay a provider more than what I'd pay Linode because they maintain the server. Whereas with Linode, the VPS is yours and you do what you want with it. That goes for back ups as well, how are they configured and are they included with the £80/month?

If the server's configuration, updates etc are handled by ourselves then we would be looking at Linode I think. If we require a company to look after the server so we just concentrate on the site maintenance then I don't know who to suggest to be honest.

[Talbot]

7 hours ago, tobyd said:

£50 a month for the spec of machine and backup of the entire site and its content to another country (in case the datacenter burnt down) was a total steal at that price. They've since bought their prices inline with most of their competitors but gave a years grace to their existing customers so this increase should not have been news to you or any of the administrators.

You might want to consider having Invision themselves host the site (currently $89/mo) - I can't tell if that offering does everything you currently have but you could ask them - this might also include the software license cost. I don't think you'll be able to get this site to run on a cheapo (£5.99/mo) webhost designed for peoples unread blogs or local interest websites written in Word '97 because they don't offer you full access to the underlying VM or have limits that the size of AS exceeds.

All the smaller cloud hosts (Linode, Hetzner, OVH, whoever), as you currently use, are priced about the same. The larger ones (AWS, Azure) are all more expensive.

This is very useful information, and just shows how astonishingly out-of-date I am with the current costs and ways of hosting things online.  If £80/month is the right price for this sort of hosting these days, then I suspect it will just have to be a "grin and bear it".  Not only that, but I now understand there would be a fairly significant one-off-cost for moving all our data away from the current provider, which would likely mean that we wouldn't see a payback on that move for quite some time.

I am not *in any way* thinking we need to bail and move immediately, I just want to keep options open, and am very appreciative of the above.  If what we're currently paying is actually reasonable, then it may be better not to rock the boat.    But I don't know, hence asking the question.

Many thanks to all for contributions so far.  I believe that has brought the kitty back above the waterline.

[colino]

I( think I've made a contribution, but that seemed to take longer than it should with PP.

[privatewire]

Done via PayPal F&F

[AnthonyG]

Done via PP.

[Mally]

Done pp

[808 Estate]

Do not go anywhere near Dediserve (or any variations of that name). I know of another forum that had a shit ton of grief with them with downtime and poor support. When the server finally fell over, it was discovered the system backup was also stored on the same hardsware host. They lost loads of data.

I use Namecheap, but that is for a very low traffic level forum. They have been good, but I dont know about their high bandwidth hosting options.

[Skcat]

Just saw this for the first time! Sent! 

[gadgetgricey]

Done

[DanGleables]

Donation made 🙂

[catsinthewelder]

On 5/8/2022 at 5:23 PM, 808 Estate said:

Do not go anywhere near Dediserve (or any variations of that name). I know of another forum that had a shit ton of grief with them with downtime and poor support. When the server finally fell over, it was discovered the system backup was also stored on the same hardsware host. They lost loads of data.

 

Was that RMWeb?  Similar happened there recently loosing all the pictures.

[Rust Collector]

Moneys sent through Kofi as I don’t have a PayPal 🙂

[808 Estate]

15 hours ago, catsinthewelder said:

Was that RMWeb?  Similar happened there recently loosing all the pictures.

Indeed it was.

[Talbot]

Someone with the initials P.M. has tried to do a friends and family payment to the email address listed, however they have sent it to "autoshitehostings" rather than "autoshitehosting".   Could P.M. please cancel the payment and re-send to the correct address please!

[Mally]

Possibly me, I'll check later.

[Mally]

10 hours ago, Talbot said:

Someone with the initials P.M. has tried to do a friends and family payment to the email address listed, however they have sent it to "autoshitehostings" rather than "autoshitehosting".   Could P.M. please cancel the payment and re-send to the correct address please!

All being well, it's now sorted. 

It's an age thing.