Deadline Is Getting Close

[stovall]

Here is a heads up on the SOH server, we have three weeks to meet our goal. Right now we are at 52%. Payday is approaching and we are hoping this will allow us to gather the remaining 48%. We must face facts. If we don't meet our goal please consider what SOH can do without. As time gets closer I will post a list of options we can forgo to pay the bills. Those who have contributed please accept our sincere thanks for keeping us advertizing and pop-up free.

[ejoiner]

Here is a heads up on the SOH server, we have three weeks to meet our goal. Right now we are at 52%. Payday is approaching and we are hoping this will allow us to gather the remaining 48%. We must face facts. If we don't meet our goal please consider what SOH can do without. As time gets closer I will post a list of options we can forgo to pay the bills. Those who have contributed please accept our sincere thanks for keeping us advertizing and pop-up free.

Hi Stovall, I contributed on day 1 of this drive, so I believe in the exercise. However, lets be open about this since this crowd funded. How much is the target and what do you need?

kind regards
Eric

[rpjkw]

Payday for me is not until Feb. 2, but you can count on me again on that date. SOH is by far the best Flight Sim site.

Bob

[Anthin]

Will contribute again Thursday (Pension Day).
I wish Oz dollar was not worth 79 cents US.

Anthin.

[odourboy]

Hi Stovall, I contributed on day 1 of this drive, so I believe in the exercise. However, lets be open about this since this crowd funded. How much is the target and what do you need?

kind regards
Eric

Hi Scott,

$13000 is our goal for 2015.

Roger.

Roger was open from the get-go. I'm sorry to see SOH is struggling to make it's modest goal. I'll guess I'll have to kick in a bit more.

[fsxar177]

I would like to see a list of expenses, and what the yearly/monthly dues are.

- Joseph

[TARPSBird]

I will kick in again if it helps us to keep things running full up. Pretty sad that SOH has almost 18,000 members and we're still coming up short of our goal. Betcha all those lurkers out there have downloaded plenty of stuff, and learned a lot from the various forums, but I guess not enough to justify coughing up a few bucks once a year.

[papab]

Here is a heads up on the SOH server, we have three weeks to meet our goal. Right now we are at 52%. Payday is approaching and we are hoping this will allow us to gather the remaining 48%. We must face facts. If we don't meet our goal please consider what SOH can do without. As time gets closer I will post a list of options we can forgo to pay the bills. Those who have contributed please accept our sincere thanks for keeping us advertizing and pop-up free.

54% of $13,000.00 collected=$7,020.00
Balance due= $5,980.00
Remaining days= 20


So we need $299.00 per day to hit our goal
The site is open 24 hours a day which = $12.46 per hour

Not a lot when you break it down
Off to give my additional donation!

Rick

[huub vink]

I would like to see a list of expenses, and what the yearly/monthly dues are.

- Joseph

Joseph, we are a crowd funded organisation purely ran by volunteers. As we don’t have stockholders or employ people we don’t really have an annual report or something similar. The money we try to raise with our donation drive is spend to keep two servers running in an professionally ran data centre. Over the past years file sizes have increased and so did the number of files in our library. So we need disk space but also sufficient bandwidth. The voluntary staff as a team discusses where to spend money and how to run the SOH as cheap as possible. In our decision where to spend money we try to listen to wishes of the members.

In the end it is a matter of trust and how much you care about the SOH. Perhaps somtimes we have the "best buy" and in other case we perhaps could have found a cheaper solution, but in general I think we do quite a nice job. The SOH is very reliable and still pop-up and advert free. When all member would contribute amount of money for 2 or 3 beers we would raise more money than we currently ask for. Of course I don’t know people's financial situation, but it sometimes surprises me to see people purchasing all possible add-ons, which they sometimes hardly use, but are not prepared to spend any money on “their” forum, where they reside hours and hours every day.

Cheers,
Huub

edit: Shortened after the detailed reply below.

[Dangerousdave26]

Hi Stovall, I contributed on day 1 of this drive, so I believe in the exercise. However, lets be open about this since this crowd funded. How much is the target and what do you need?

kind regards
Eric

The Goal is $13,000 US.

That covers:

Rent on .com server 1 x 32 bit Linux Server (physical Server), Quad Core Xeon Processor, 1 TB Hard Drive 4 GB ram
--- This is the server that houses our main website Forums and file library.

Rent on .net server 1 x 32 bit Windows Server 2008 Standard (physical Server), Quad Core Xeon Processor, 1 TB Hard Drive, 4 GB ram and Microsoft's Yearly fee for the windows operating system.
--- This is the server that hosts our TeamSpeak3, FS Host, Backup Forums, and where we physically backup the .com Server

Yearly software license fees we have to pay for functions that run on the servers.
--- Many of them are not visible to the normal members. This includes anti virus for the .net, Stop Forum Spam for both servers, vBulletin fees, cPanel fees, csf fees and a host of other things I know I am forgetting.

Yearly maintenance fee for onsite support.
--- This pays the company who physically shows up to touch the server if something goes wrong. This is money we hope we never need but in the past its been needed. Keep in mind that we pay this company a hour rate if they have go to the data center to touch the servers.

We pay for all of our bandwidth allotment each year up front for both servers.
---Every year we have had to increase the allotment because our bandwidth needs keep going up of course because of the file library downloads. The sad thing is this keeps going up but the number of unique donators to SOH keeps going down or is stagnant.

Every donation costs us money.
--- Its sad to say but every donation has a cost. Pay Pal charges us a % for each donation so the bandwidth drive has to include the fact that out of that $13,000 close to $1,000 is going to paypal. Proportionally they take less for larger donations than smaller donations. So if each member donates just $10 we pay them more than if each member donated $500. Worse yet is when a member donates but the donation has been cancelled which has happened in the past. When the donation is cancelled we get hit with fees that end up erasing several small donations not just the one that cancelled.

It is preferred that any money we need to support the site through out the year comes form the yearly bandwidth drive. It's necessary to keep some money in an account to cover any unforeseen expenses that might happen through out the year. If you remember a few months ago Ickie had to run a mini charter drive. This was because our coffers were dry and we hit a few extra expenses.

This year is unique in that the .com server needs to be replaced or a new hard drive. About a month ago it started throwing hard drive errors complaining that a drive failure might be pending. We are looking into a new server but I fear that we may just end up replacing the hard drive. If we have to replace it that means having the maintenance company there to image the drive then restore the image to the new drive. That process can take almost a whole day. So lets say that it takes 8hrs including drive time to the site @ $150/hr that is $1200 or 9.25% of this years bandwidth drive.

So the $13,000 is a guess based on what we know we have to pay and what we think we might need in the future.

For everyone who has donated I say Thank You

For everyone who has not please do.

We really need to expand our donation base for the future. We are a shrinking hobby and its more important now than in years past that we all pitch in. We have some 4,000 active members yet only 282 of those members have donated and I know for a fact that more than one of them is not unique.

[flaviossa]

Why don´t you guys use a RAID 1 format with the disks? You can have any drive replaced without need to turn off the server and the cost of the tech team will be one hour at most. And with an advantage to have another local backup. Hard drives aren´t so expensive (Even for professional data storage) this days.

Anyway, i´ll try to make a new donation soon.

[Daveroo]

ive got to wait until the 3rd..but i can only do 10-15 bucks..im still a poor fella............need to stop buying toys i guess...

[Felixthreeone]

I already contributed my Alabeo Cardinal $$. I can live without the Citation and donate more when I get paid this week. I know money is tight for most people, but heck....if you can hold off on purchasing one addon for a week or two, and donate instead, it helps us all here at SOH as a community. I don't even frequent the site as much as I used to (have a 2-year old and a newborn now) but I still feel as though this is like FS 'home' for me. Just saying.

[ejoiner]

Here is a heads up on the SOH server, we have three weeks to meet our goal. Right now we are at 52%. Payday is approaching and we are hoping this will allow us to gather the remaining 48%. We must face facts. If we don't meet our goal please consider what SOH can do without. As time gets closer I will post a list of options we can forgo to pay the bills. Those who have contributed please accept our sincere thanks for keeping us advertizing and pop-up free.

Payday is next friday for me. I'll kick in another $50 USD at that time.

[Jafo]

Paid advertising can be both an income as well as an incentive to users to donate/pay to NOT see the advertising....or perhaps to give donors the option to not see it/them [if it's sim-related they may WANT to anyway].

I administer a website with 6 million plus registered users and precious few subscribers. Eventually it's a case of the few 'supporting' the many, so any incentives should be adopted. Thankfully the site is commercially owned. [Stardock.com]

Not sure how it is here [brain fade] but to have SOH host a user's/uploader's bandwidth he/she 'should need' to be a subscriber [donor] first...

A non-profit site needs also to be a non-loss one too ...

[Mickey D]

ive got to wait until the 3rd..but i can only do 10-15 bucks..im still a poor fella............need to stop buying toys i guess...

$10 to $15 is enough. If only 3/4 of the registered members pay $10 that equals $30000. Enough to keep the site going for another 2 years. Let's see how many are still blue at the end of the campaign then change the rules so only those who've donated can post and download. When times are hard time to get tough. Oh how I hate freeloaders.
Bet that kills the thread

[Roger]

$10 to $15 is enough. If only 3/4 of the registered members pay $10 that equals $30000. Enough to keep the site going for another 2 years. Let's see how many are still blue at the end of the campaign then change the rules so only those who've donated can post and download. When times are hard time to get tough. Oh how I hate freeloaders.
Bet that kills the thread

Not going to close the thread Mickey; it's too important. However we don't want to condemn those who genuinely can't afford to pay, like the elderly, or students, or our younger membership who have no ability to pay. For some members we are not their main site, so let us NOT bait the membership who remain blue.

[fsafranek]

Paid advertising can be both an income as well as an incentive to users to donate/pay to NOT see the advertising....or perhaps to give donors the option to not see it/them [if it's sim-related they may WANT to anyway].

Would that include not having to see the threads from developers (the ones started by developers or their "staff") that go on and on using this place to advertise long before the product is released? Obviously I'm kidding but it would be interesting if anyone benefitting from the exposure here was required to pay for that exposure based on number of views and/or posts to the thread.

What I would really like to be able to turn off are not ads but the "Server is busy. Please come back later" messages. If the server can only handle so many registered users and guests at a time and gets near that limit then it should see who I am, know that I am a donor, and drop someone who isn't. I know that sounds selfish but I'm sure I'm not the only one who has experienced this. And it always seems to happen when I just read something and want to add some helpful/useful information. When it does that I say "screw it" and toss the link or information I was going to share and go somewhere else.

By the way, I do donate every time there is a drive whether it is for bandwidth, laptops, etc.

[Lane Street]

Has anyone considered an e-mail blast to the entire members list?

I would bet that a lot of the members joined simply for access to the library and don't regularly visit the forums. Some might be happy to give a little.

cheers,
Lane

[Roger]

......What I would really like to be able to turn off are not ads but the "Server is busy. Please come back later" messages. If the server can only handle so many registered users and guests at a time and gets near that limit then it should see who I am, know that I am a donor, and drop someone who isn't. I know that sounds selfish but I'm sure I'm not the only one who has experienced this. And it always seems to happen when I just read something and want to add some helpful/useful information. When it does that I say "screw it" and toss the link or information I was going to share and go somewhere else.

By the way, I do donate every time there is a drive whether it is for bandwidth, laptops, etc.

Frank I have never seen that message and I'm sorry if sometimes you cannot get on to SOH. I will make inquiries.

[Dangerousdave26]

The server is set to run scared if it goes beyond a load of 5.

vBulletin can read the overall load of the server on certain *NIX setups (including Linux).

This allows vBulletin to determine the load on the server and processor, and to turn away further users if the load becomes too high.

If you do not want to use this option, set it to 0.
A typical level would be 5.00 for a reasonable warning level.

I do not see a way that can be changed by user group.

[Mickey D]

We're up to 60% now. Maybe I touched a few raw nerves. Everything I said is relevant. No regrets. No prisoners.

[TARPSBird]

Has anyone considered an e-mail blast to the entire members list?
I would bet that a lot of the members joined simply for access to the library and don't regularly visit the forums. Some might be happy to give a little.
cheers,
Lane

I think that's an outstanding idea. Instead of a membership drive thread that they can ignore on the forums, send all of the 17,000+ lurkers an e-mail specifically asking for their help. If just a fraction of that population give in to their pangs of guilt and make donations of $10-$20 we'll be in great shape.

[Peg o my heart]

I will contribute. Not much but I'll do what I can. I dont know why I was roaming on many forums sonmany years but here. This is the best and most friendly flightsim website.

[vonstroheim]

Longue vie à SOH!

In this (lousy) screenshoot, 3 outstanding creations I found right here:

The famous Douglas C-47 by Manfred Jahn & Team, Aer Lingus repaint by Flyinggoldfish, and Tandragee airfield by Dimus