Hey Everyone,
The site has been cruising along for nearly eight years now! To me, that is a fairly fantastic thing to accomplish!<3 The site has been created and maintained for fans, by fans.
Traditionally, member donations have outpaced monthly costs allowing us to upgrade our servers whenever the need arose every year or so. However, this trend has not kept up over the last year. Donations have been coming in at a slightly slower pace than site monthly expenses, thus causing us to use our “server savings” to keep the site running. But, now we really need a new server.
Our current video storage servers consist of a 1TB server (full) and a 2TB server (almost full) with offsite full mirror backup servers of each. With the 2TB storage server reaching full capacity very soon, we need to purchase a new server in order to continue hosting videos. With the price of hard drives going down and their capacities going up, we should be able to replace the two existing servers with one server while doubling total capacity. Now we just need to be able to pay for it.
In addition to a general “please donate” call, there are two other things that need discussion: how to generate more donations in the future and what to do with the old machines.
Servers:
With 1TB hard drives going for around the $130 mark, we should be able to get a small stack of those, RAID them together, and yield about 6TB of usable space for same price as one of our old machines. This new server would fully replace the old machines and should have enough space to last a few years at our current upload rate.
As for the old servers, there are a few options. 1) Wipe them and sell them on eBay. 2) Auction them off as is here on the site with all the videos they have still intact. 3) Auction off the hard drives individually filled with the best videos available on the site and then auction the servers (sans hard drives)? The hard drives themselves range from 160G to 250G each. At an average of 35MB per video, that would be about 4500 to 7100 of the best videos ever created on each drive. Winners would be able to choose from best of the old, best of the new, or best of all time. I think option #3 is the best for both the site and site members. ^_^
Preemptive Q&A:
What are our expenses? We have a fixed monthly cost of $2,550 for space, power and 185MBps of bandwidth which we can use as much or as little as we want at no extra charge. Bandwidth-throttling downloads does not affect our expenses.
Can we add a new smaller server to the existing ones instead of replacing the ones we have? We are allocated a certain amount of physical server space in the datacenter and we have used up our allotment. We could add more, but our monthly expense would go up. Also, old hardware is old, slower and more prone to failure than shiny new hardware (this becomes important if we want to stream videos)?
Can we just replace the hard drives in the current servers? The old server drives are the old ATA133 interface. All new 1TB+ hard drives are SATA. We would need a new server chassis, RAID controller card, and probably a new motherboard. For all that, we might as well just get a whole new machine.
Can we delete old videos? The goal of the site is to collect every video ever created. Deleting videos would go against that purpose.
Why did we wait so long? With hardware prices constantly dropping, the best time to buy is at the very last minute. When we were first looking at the server replacement, hard drive costs were more than double what they are now. Prices drop fast.
Donations:
WE GREATLY APPRECIATE THE DONATIONS GIVEN BY SITE MEMBERS! YOU ROCK!<3
Since expenses are outpacing donations, we need to figure out ways to boost donations in order to keep the site going. The site having expenses greater than income is obviously unsustainable.
With the extra storage space, we are looking into possibly allowing streaming videos in addition to the current downloads. We could make video streaming a “donator only” feature. Donators could view any video in streaming format, have the option to show their own videos in streaming format to non-donating members, and have the option to block their own videos from streaming if the creator wanted to have their videos available for download only.
Selling site merchandise (t-shirts, mugs, etc.) could also boost income. However, it would require someone to hold the stock and fulfill orders as they came in. Getting an individual to do this could be problematic and would require us to put up some cash to get the items printed before selling them.
The best kind of ideas would be ones with the least amount of human interaction. Adding access to search features and donators forum is done automatically by the system. If we set up video streaming, that too would be an automatic system adjustment. Any suggestions along these lines are the best for everyone involved. ^_^
Conclusion:
If we want to continue hosting new videos, we desperately need donations! Heck, if we want to keep the site going for the long term, we desperately need donations!<3 Please help us by donating and coming up with new donation incentives. [Linda Richmond] Discuss.??
Phade.










