I appreciate the outpouring of support. 
The RPC does have people other than me to mod; Merri, Alothia, and Xenedra all have mod privileges. I have thought about adding a few more people to that team, though usually the moderation load is pretty light. I may be approaching people to help out in the future, though.
As for hosting costs, I appreciate the offers of donations. Just to let everyone know, I have a few personal websites I run off a virtual private server at the moment. That VPS is wildly underused, but I also dislike the host (too much unscheduled downtime
), so I was considering moving those over to Azure or EC2 anyway. If I'm already going to be paying the cost for a VM there, I might as well bump it up to a more powerful one or spring for managed database services and roll the RPC onto that. That'd keep the incremental spend where I feel comfortable paying it myself. I'd really prefer not to put out a collections plate if I don't have to.
The trick, of course, is that cloud hosts are hard to compare against normal shared web hosting and even against each other. What I don't want to do is move off our current hosting into something that performs even worse or that will cost a lot more money. Don't worry -- we're not in danger of failing to pay our hosting bills, I assure you.
EDIT: Also, a bonus of running the site on a VPS is faster software upgrades and more ability for me to potentially code stuff to fix some problems we have. Doing either of those things on a shared host is... unpleasant. I'd much rather ssh or RDP in to do that.
</magicAdminHat>
The RPC does have people other than me to mod; Merri, Alothia, and Xenedra all have mod privileges. I have thought about adding a few more people to that team, though usually the moderation load is pretty light. I may be approaching people to help out in the future, though.
As for hosting costs, I appreciate the offers of donations. Just to let everyone know, I have a few personal websites I run off a virtual private server at the moment. That VPS is wildly underused, but I also dislike the host (too much unscheduled downtime
), so I was considering moving those over to Azure or EC2 anyway. If I'm already going to be paying the cost for a VM there, I might as well bump it up to a more powerful one or spring for managed database services and roll the RPC onto that. That'd keep the incremental spend where I feel comfortable paying it myself. I'd really prefer not to put out a collections plate if I don't have to. The trick, of course, is that cloud hosts are hard to compare against normal shared web hosting and even against each other. What I don't want to do is move off our current hosting into something that performs even worse or that will cost a lot more money. Don't worry -- we're not in danger of failing to pay our hosting bills, I assure you.
EDIT: Also, a bonus of running the site on a VPS is faster software upgrades and more ability for me to potentially code stuff to fix some problems we have. Doing either of those things on a shared host is... unpleasant. I'd much rather ssh or RDP in to do that.
</magicAdminHat>
The Freelance Wizard
Quality RP at low, low prices!
((about me | about L'yhta Mahre | L'yhta's desk | about Mysterium, the Ivory Tower: a heavy RP society of mages))
Quality RP at low, low prices!
((about me | about L'yhta Mahre | L'yhta's desk | about Mysterium, the Ivory Tower: a heavy RP society of mages))
