FK 2023 Costs & Donations

Hello all, I thought it was about time to sit down and update the costs for the FK servers/licenses currently, and let you know a bit about the work kMaN has been doing since taking over from @mrrbatty. Since taking over from him, kMaN has been working on reducing our current costs (our donation goal was downsized from €300 to €150/month a while back after changes in infrastructure). Working with the Tech team and have consolidated our resources to cut some costs. So, let's recap on our changes before I get into the current costings:

FK 1 & Aux Box

We used to have FK1 running on a separate server with the FK Aux box running virtual servers for all our other resources FK2/3/4/5, Teamspeak, Website, Foundry, etc. We have stopped the payment for that box and the old AUX server and instead switched to a more powerful server to run all our servers from one box and moved all the resources onto the new server, the cost of the new server was not that much more than we were paying for the Aux box on its own. This work was started and finished in the latter half of 2022, because the priority was reducing the cost of the website.

FK Website

The FK website has undergone a lot of changes to make it more stable, along with updating it to the latest software versions. Before he left, Mavy moved us to a new cloud-based solution which sped up page loading a good amount, however he left shortly after this migration and didn't see the increase in costs caused by this migration, which was well over €100 a month just for the website. Mrbatty was attempting to get it moved to cheaper hosting but could not complete this due to lack of time IRL, so upon handing the reigns over to @kMaN, he and @L00_Cyph3r have done some excellent work in moving the website to cheaper hosting, saving us a lot on the monthly costs. This project was the priority and was started in early 2022.

Website Modules

The TeamSpeak module on the website was unfortunately a victim of the recent updates, because the author hasn't updated the module in several years. This module allowed users to input their TeamSpeak UUID so that tags from the website could integrate over to Teamspeak. At this time, updating or adding the UUID to a user's profile will need to be done manually by a CM or Tech.

Teamspeak

The original TeamSpeak license was owned and hosted by Mavy. As the free licenses are no longer being offered by Teamspeak and transferring the license from Mavy was not an option, we had to get a new yearly license when creating the new TeamSpeak server.

Anyway, after those updates, let's move on to the current costs.

Thus the new donations total is €150

To conclude…

That was a lot to take in! I'm glad you stuck around to read all this boring stuff. As always, if you'd like to discuss any of this, reach out to kMaN on Discord.

Everyone who donates to FK has the eternal gratitude of the FK Staff for continuing to host a community we are proud to be a part of. All donations are welcome, if you wish to donate, please visit our donation page, https://www.fkgaming.eu/donate/

Special thanks to @L00_Cyph3r for handling the majority of the server, website migration and cutting FK costs by 50%.

After failing several times, one time to PC failure, to organize and create this post, I'd like to thank @LurkerOne for finally taking his time to put this together. Something I should have done months......okay, okay.....a year ago.