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Sharing hosting fees on Patreon
Post Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2015 8:52 pm
Last edited by Bock on Sun Feb 08, 2015 11:05 pm; edited 1 time in total
I have created a Patreon page to share the hosting fees for SMS Power!

https://www.patreon.com/smspower

I've been paying for a few years, which has been fine until now. But having left my job a few months ago to pursue independence, it wouldn't hurt me if this cost could be shared among users. If some of you could chip in a few $/month the cost will be covered very quickly.

I am still spending unreasonable amounts on occasional Sega 8-bit items (prototypes, more recently graphic board and some of the Sega AI stuff) so this is a small fraction of my overall spendings. However I understand the later are harder to justify as community spending because they are physical items that I am generally keeping (as I intend to keep the collection complete and eventually available to archivists). So the Patreon is generally to cover hosting. In the event the Patreon fund goes over the cost of hosting I intend to use the money to buy more stuff that can be released digitally to the community. If you are uncomfortable with that please step-in/discuss!

Thank you all <3
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Post Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2015 9:57 pm
Hi Bock.

Unfortunatley I can't donate. I didn't even registered Meka in all these years (since 0.13!) first because of financial problems and now because of legal restricitions. If you live in Argentina, you can't buy foreign currency without permission from the gov't and we can't even send money abroad using our local currency.

Even worse, US dollars and Euros are very expensive.

I'll do some research to see if I can use PayPal to circunvent the ban and donate in the (near, I hope) future.

But I'd like to know SMS Power!'s current hosting plan details either here or via PM (bandwidth and storage quota, other limits) so I can see if i can suggest a better/cheaper hosting company. That would help reduce costs (hopefully).
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Post Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2015 10:23 pm
Last edited by Bock on Sun Feb 22, 2015 5:37 pm; edited 1 time in total
By all means don't worry. The money to gather isn't much and I'm sure it can covered, it's not worth the hassle if your situation makes it uneasy.

We are using Gandi.net, you can check their specs here.
We are currently on PHP/Mysql, L, 10-GB
https://www.gandi.net/hosting/simple?language=php&db=mysql&grid=A
There's an additional 30% of disk space required for backups.

I am sure we can find better hosts here or there. But realize that our time as maintainers and developers is more valuable than paying a dozen dollars. Moving and testing a host implies a fair amount of work and can't be done too often.
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Post Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2015 10:44 pm
Well, in case you ever need to move, I've been using this hosting service for a while;

https://byethost.com/index.php/paid-hosting

I understand it's very unlikely for SMS Power! to move to another hosting, but I'm sharing this just in case you ever need to. I am not affiliated in any way and I won't have any benefit if you decide to move. It's not a referral link. It's a good service overall, but it has downtimes every now and then.
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Post Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2015 10:59 pm
I haven't had a job in the past 2.5 years, so I'm afraid I can't donate as of now :(

However, I promise I won't hesitate to donate when/if my situation will be better.
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Post Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2015 12:35 pm
I'm in a position to donate, so I have done.
As far as I'm concerned, the site is invaluable, so I hope my small contribution helps keep things rolling.
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Post Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2015 1:25 pm
Thanks a lot to the first supporters Anders and TinpotGamer!
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Post Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2015 6:06 pm
No problem :) Thanks for a great site and great software!
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Post Posted: Tue Feb 10, 2015 3:47 pm
Wehn I paid for my hosting I did so in local currency, so I guess if there's a way to donate in pesos, I'll be able to. I'll do it if/whn I can.
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Post Posted: Tue Feb 10, 2015 5:31 pm
I'd like to contribute, but I'm reluctant to open an account at yet another site. I'm trying to cut down on those at the moment. Is there a way I could make a donation via PayPal instead?
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Post Posted: Tue Feb 10, 2015 7:33 pm
Thanks Calindro and Jordi.

kagesan:

Patreon is the future of crowd-funding, you'll want an account eventually :)

I always took the rare/occasional paypal donations (for meka/smspower, as vague "we entrust you to use this money well"). However for this specific purpose I think it is nicer to keep the thing open and feeling like a shared responsibility / community thing. I'm happy to have a little less money through Patreon and preserve this aspect.
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Post Posted: Tue Feb 10, 2015 8:41 pm
Any chance to host SMSPower on Digital Ocean Bock ?

Recall the credit card requirement, I've tried a $10/month droplet with VPS root access, and they give you a $ 1.25 free trial credit.

See the specs attached.

The customer service is responsive and very good! This is the first cloud service I saw that makes possible to keep an image of the server offline without being billed for.

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Post Posted: Wed Feb 11, 2015 9:21 am
Bock wrote
Thanks Calindro and Jordi.

kagesan:

Patreon is the future of crowd-funding, you'll want an account eventually :)

I always took the rare/occasional paypal donations (for meka/smspower, as vague "we entrust you to use this money well"). However for this specific purpose I think it is nicer to keep the thing open and feeling like a shared responsibility / community thing. I'm happy to have a little less money through Patreon and preserve this aspect.


Oh, i see that Patreon shared my real name ("Jordi").

Glad to contribute!
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Post Posted: Fri Feb 13, 2015 9:55 pm
And thanks Kagesan! :)
Sorry it made you register to another website!
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Post Posted: Sat Feb 14, 2015 10:24 am
Bock wrote
Sorry it made you register to another website!

LOL, no worries. If SMSPower isn't worth that then what else could possibly be? :)
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Post Posted: Mon Feb 16, 2015 12:20 pm
Thanks balkry! very kind of you!
That's basic hosting fees already covered.
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Post Posted: Mon Feb 16, 2015 7:28 pm
You're welcome. It is a pleasure to give a small help ;-)
You deserve it all really for all the work you have done for years
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Post Posted: Tue Feb 17, 2015 11:16 pm
OK, I think that I'm supporting you by a very small amount, but I've never used Patreon before, so not sure if that's happening or not ...
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Post Posted: Tue Feb 17, 2015 11:25 pm
Yes I just received a notification for it :)
Thank you!
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Post Posted: Thu Feb 19, 2015 12:33 pm
And thanks a lot Niloct :)
This is very cool. We can probably improve hosting capacity soon.

To answer your question. It's hard to judge of a host before the fact, the quality is down to a lot of details but mainly here the main site is bottlenecked by CPU and disk access.
Gandi works (even if some of its feature are annoying) and our site is slow mainly because of how we setup the Wiki. That would require more engineering work to improve. Maxim and I actually did some optimisation to it recently. It's difficult to tell in advance of how other hosts would react to our usage of CPU, how that is capped. It's not unreasonable to try moving and that will tend to improve the site "portability" (which is a desired thing) but it is also lots of hassle, that's suddenly a week-end gone.
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Post Posted: Thu Feb 19, 2015 1:14 pm
You're welcome, I'm glad to join forces here.

Digital Ocean runs on SSD harddisks.

And I've noticed SMSPower doesn't run in a VPS ? Having root capabilites in the machine would be great: for instance, installing Redis as a backend to the wiki.

I volunteer to help the hosting transition if you feel like it on a weekend :)
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Post Posted: Fri Feb 20, 2015 9:12 am
*EDIT* Disregard that, it is for cloud hosting which is different from the normal web hosting. I'll investigate however.

Gandi just announced price reduction yesterday!
https://www.gandi.net/news/en/2015-02-19/3376-prices_reduced_for_gandi_cloud_hos...

Short version:
Quote
Here's some examples of pricing in dollars / euros for typical configurations (based on buying a 2 Millions credit pack):

1 CPU + 1GB RAM + 20GB disk + 1 IPV4: from $17.30 / €13.31 (264 credits / hour) to $13.79 / €12.67 (220 cr / h) per month
2 CPU + 2GB RAM + 50GB disk + 1 IPV4: from $33.28 / €25.60 to $23.95 / €19.96 per month


I'll check and upgrade asap.
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Post Posted: Sun Feb 22, 2015 5:40 pm
I have just upgraded to a L instance which gives us 8 simultaneous php processes (instead of 4). That should alleviate the times where the machine is stalling on processes finishing. From today let's see if this makes an effective difference.

( It's hard to tell what's the ratio of
- Registered / regular users browsing
- Random users stumbling on the site from links / searches
- Crawlers and bots making queries

Effectively we are probably serving lots of crawlers like many sites do.)
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Post Posted: Mon Feb 23, 2015 1:51 pm
Just wanted to say congrats on getting funded for the month, even though it's a small total amount, it's great that people are willing to contribute even $1 for continued use of this resource.
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Post Posted: Fri Feb 27, 2015 9:46 am
Thank you to everyone who has donated to help improve SMS Power!

Bock wrote
I have just upgraded to a L instance which gives us 8 simultaneous php processes (instead of 4). That should alleviate the times where the machine is stalling on processes finishing. From today let's see if this makes an effective difference.

One obvious change: The Site/Auditing page now works again (previously it would always time-out).
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Post Posted: Wed Jun 03, 2015 9:39 am
Thanks everyone for your support. After fees there's $23.40 / month from Patreon (out of about $26.5+domain name) so it's cool and sustainable.

I have renewed the hosting instance for 3 extra months in advance (there's no visible benefit in renewing for longer).
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Post Posted: Wed Jan 27, 2016 11:51 am
Thanks again for keeping this up!
I've received the yearly Patreon report for a total of $233.96 received this year (consider it started collecting on February 29, so extrapolating for 12 months that would be about $280). Hosting is $299/year + domain name cost so we are good. I kindly ask everyone that we keep this going. Thanks again :)
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Post Posted: Tue Feb 09, 2016 4:42 am
Added a couple of dollarydoos. :3
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Post Posted: Tue Feb 09, 2016 12:15 pm
Thank you Ashlyn, just received the notification, much appreciated :)
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Post Posted: Tue Feb 16, 2016 9:20 pm
One Dollar more.
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Post Posted: Wed Jun 01, 2016 8:12 pm
Finally, I'm in!
+ sharing this post and the Patreon page on some groups to try to attract others :)
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Post Posted: Sun Mar 06, 2022 8:55 pm
Hi,

First post on this forum! 💪 hopefully by no means the last! 🤞

I've been shamefully lurking for best part of a couple of years now, as I've been working on an educational project to "build your own console" which, as it happens, can play SMS cartridge games. 👾

This site and forum have been enormously useful, and I wanted to see if I could pay a little back to the community, and found this old thread.

Can I just check - would it still be useful to donate towards hosting via Patreon, or is there some other preferred way to support?
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Post Posted: Mon Mar 07, 2022 2:34 pm
I missed this post back in 2015 but glad I caught the resurrected thread. I have signed up. This forum is home to one of the highest signal:noise communities out there and deserves support.
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Post Posted: Mon Mar 07, 2022 3:49 pm
Thanks both for your kindness. Support is appreciated. I noticed that the Patreon tends to move up and down (which is fine), at least hosting fees tends to be covered overall. Please only contribute if you can afford it and if that’s not a dent in your spendings.
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