November 2020 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 I've been doing since taking over from @Mavy. Since taking over from him I've been looking at our current costs (as they have not been updated in 2+ years even after changes in infrastructure) with the Tech team and how to cut some costs, some of which I've already done, and others I still have yet to do. So, let me recap on our changes before I get into the current costings.

FK 2 has been replaced

Something I noticed as soon as I looked at our current FK infrastructure is that FK 2, our 'carbon copy' of the ARMA box we use for FK 1, is used perhaps 1% of the time, and was just as expensive as FK 1 to run, clocking in at just over €40 a month. A bit steep, right? Thus last month we didn't renew that box and instead refreshed FK 2 with a virtual server hosted on our lovely Aux server hosted by @kMaNand @Garfield (This also hosts FK ARMA 2/3/4/5, FTP Server, ARMA Admin/ARA Stuff, DCS Server, sometimes Minecraft). This effectively reduces required donations by over 40 euro a month as we are already paying for the FK Aux box. 

FK Website

As you may remember, the FK website was running quite slowly 6+ months ago, down to a mix of our provider and generally the FK website framework not being super robust. 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, to costing over €100 a month in hosting the website, and associated logging/certificate management/DNS management. This is usually offset by the generous donations we receive, but it is still a large amount of money monthly and something I don't particularly enjoy paying for. Since removing FK 2, cutting this cost is my next task. Short term I will be looking to decrease the amount of resources allocated by this provider to reduce costs, and potentially long term looking at switching provider. 

Website Modules

Due to them not being particularly used, I have stopped paying for two website licenses; Videobox and Steam Profiles. This doesn't actually change much as the website will still feature these functions, however they won't be featured in any places and some of the Twitch functionality has been removed as it didn't really work anyway. If any website updates break these further (no license = no support/updates), they will be removed completely.

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

Updated Costs

Thus the new donations total will be €293, for ease (€0.11 buys me a beer in like, a year right?). I completely admit that this increased goal is a lot to do with the website hosting, so it will be rectified as soon as I have time to figure it out.

Updating the donations page

One of the points in passing from Mavy when he left was his plan to merge all the donations goals back into a singular goal for ease, and I agree with his intentions. This will make donations much easier to manage in the future, ensure costs are distributed evenly between FK 'services', and I will continue to ensure that costs are passed to kMaN and Garfield to pay for the Aux server (as they are kind enough to host that for us). 

To conclude...

That was a lot to take in! I'm glad you stuck around to read all this boring stuff. As always, my DMs are open for you to slide into if you'd like to discuss any of this, or reach me on Discord.

Everyone who donates to FK has my eternal gratitude for continuing to host a community I'm proud to be a part of.