Just a quick update to say thank you very much to everyone who's donated so far towards helping me out with the financial side of the server and infrastructure costs. You all know who you are :smile:
We're about half way there on the $2500 I tentatively shot for after just a few days, and all donations are obviously very welcome no matter if it's a dollar or hundreds. Most have come from people who've been part of the site or forums for a long time. I figured out the other day that I'm a relative newcomer to B3D and I've been around for nearly 10 years now
The last 7 or so, editor or not, I've also been the person who keeps it running.
Just to give you an idea of what I do to keep it going, so you know where the money will go:
Hardware - we run on a fairly beefy IBM x-series hosted near me in the UK, but just one. Part of the money will go towards the second machine I acquired earlier in the year and will be installing on the 3rd, to give us some failover and recovery in case anything goes wrong. We've never been resilient there and have just been lucky to never have a big hardware failure over the years until now.
Software - the forum software we license from the Jelsoft guys every year, plus I wrote the www side from scratch myself (the entire thing!) and maintain that, although it doesn't need much work these days. We also have a working email setup that I built and configured and keep running, and I do the usual diligent security work on all software fronts to minimise our surface area to attacks and whatnot. I also keep the network side up and running (our IPs will change soon for example, so I'm planning the migration work for that now).
Basically just standard part-time sysadmin and DevOps work in my remit as steward of this fine ship, even though I don't write for the site any more.
So the donations will go to very good use. 100% of it will go on the hardware side, and I'll continue to do the software and network maintenance bit in my free time.
We're about half way there on the $2500 I tentatively shot for after just a few days, and all donations are obviously very welcome no matter if it's a dollar or hundreds. Most have come from people who've been part of the site or forums for a long time. I figured out the other day that I'm a relative newcomer to B3D and I've been around for nearly 10 years now
The last 7 or so, editor or not, I've also been the person who keeps it running.Just to give you an idea of what I do to keep it going, so you know where the money will go:
Hardware - we run on a fairly beefy IBM x-series hosted near me in the UK, but just one. Part of the money will go towards the second machine I acquired earlier in the year and will be installing on the 3rd, to give us some failover and recovery in case anything goes wrong. We've never been resilient there and have just been lucky to never have a big hardware failure over the years until now.
Software - the forum software we license from the Jelsoft guys every year, plus I wrote the www side from scratch myself (the entire thing!) and maintain that, although it doesn't need much work these days. We also have a working email setup that I built and configured and keep running, and I do the usual diligent security work on all software fronts to minimise our surface area to attacks and whatnot. I also keep the network side up and running (our IPs will change soon for example, so I'm planning the migration work for that now).
Basically just standard part-time sysadmin and DevOps work in my remit as steward of this fine ship, even though I don't write for the site any more.
So the donations will go to very good use. 100% of it will go on the hardware side, and I'll continue to do the software and network maintenance bit in my free time.
