Costs and donations (October 2017)

Its been nearly 6 months since this last update and a lot has changed since then. Not only has a lot changed within the community, this month will also introduce a new system for donations. Below is an explanation and breakdown of the new system.

Goal changes:

As a lot of you have undoubtedly noticed, the past few months have been hard on us money wise. We are not getting nearly as much donations now as we had earlier this year. Because of this we decided we needed a way to see where the community wanted us to invest. What servers to keep and what servers to drop. To do this we decided to split the costs we have over different donation goals. By splitting up the goals it is easier to see where the community wants us to invest. We can then use this as a guideline when making decisions, not only on a server level but also on a community level. So lets break down the current costs and their goals.

What do we have:

First lets start with a breakdown of what we/I own, lets start with the easy stuff. There are currently 4 machines that are dedicated to FK activities, these are:

• ARMA #1 - €55,-/month (This one runs the headless clients)
• ARMA #2 - €55,-/month (The main arma server)
• ARMA #3 - €55,-/month (The test/second arma server)
• Gamebox #1 - €70,-/month
  • Currently hosts teamspeak, minecraft, blackwake, space engineers and garry's mod. This box has 64GB of ram and a 6 core cpu, in combination with virtualization it is highly flexible so I can swap games quickly depending on demand.

These are easy because these machines are dedicated to FK. The rest of our machines are hosted in combination with some of my other virtual machines, these are:

• Web server #1 - €12,50,-/month (The main website)
• Web server #2 - €5,-/month (Test site and gitlab runner, used for compiling missions/templates)
• Mail server - €5,-/month

These 3 servers are hosted on 2 dedicated machines I use for testing and some private stuff. Since they are shared I wanted a good way to share the costs between myself and the FK community.

Breakdown of the costs:

The 2 servers that I use to host from both have 8 cores, 32GB ram and several TB of storage. Each host costs €70,- making a total of 16 cores and 64GB ram for €140,-/month. I have decided to base the costs on the CPU usage, ram is not shared between the different virtual machines so any ram used by FK machines is unavailable for my machines. Dividing these makes a cost of €2,19/month per GB, I have rounded this up to €2,50/month (I too enjoy a beer for effort).

For the gamebox I have broken the costs down per IP address (we can use 7 for games/ts). This breaks down to €10,-/month per game which seemed most reasonable. These costs are at the bases of the new goals. Each goal will list the costs per server based on these calculations.

License costs:

Originally we where using an old license for our website. Support on this license had expired and there for renewal was needed. In total this currently adds another €10,-/month for the website. We also pay for the admin panel for our ArmA servers, this costs €25,-/year. Breaking down to €2,08/month, for sanity reasons I rounded this down to €2,- in the goal.

Donation methods:

I know a lot of people have asked for other ways to donate, sadly Paypal is the only viable gateway we can use. This is mostly due to the fact that other gateways do not payout transactions until a certain threshold has been reached.

Rainy day fund:

This month sees the end of the rainy day fund. It caused a lot of controversy as people felt it was being used for personal joy. In fact it is quiet the opposite. It was used to pay for FK servers while the donations where low. We are now out of spare funding and because of that making our goals is even more important.