Apologies x2

[FreelanceWizard]

 

So, many of you saw the thread I split off of another thread regarding city-wide RP. I clearly stepped in the middle of something I didn't expect in doing that, and a pure thread split that didn't carry all of the context just made things worse. I want to apologize for the drama bomb that, quite frankly, I set off in RP Discussion. The split (and, honestly, the reference to a plot to which I only have the context from these forums) was a bad call on my part, and while I certainly hope to make as few of those as possible, I am, despite rumours to the contrary, only human.

 

Apology #2 has to do with the behavior of the site itself during the life of said thread. We had a significant traffic spike that, when combined with people updating wiki pages, caused our web host to lock us down, thus producing extremely slow response times and 500 errors. The lock's been released at this point, but this has been happening with increasing frequency. I believe at this point that we've outgrown our current shared web host, and so I'm going to begin the process of evaluating providers like Azure and Amazon EC2 for new hosting so that doesn't happen again. Currently, I foot the bill for the site, so it'll be a bit for me to find solid, high performance cloud hosting that I can share with my existing web site so I don't break the bank or have to put ads up. I'm sorry that it's taken so long for me to move in this direction, but hopefully we can all bear with the current hosting for a bit longer.

 

Thanks, everyone, for all your support and contributions that keep the RPC such a vibrant community. Much love. :love:

 

[111]

You could do a donation system. I would be more than willing to help support the site financially. I would much rather do that then have adds.

 

Also it takes two to tango, lots of people besides you (*cough* me *cough*) contributed to making that trainwreck of a thread.

[Roen]

Yes! I would contribute something if something was set up. It isn't fair for one person to foot the bill for this wonderful place.

 

And you've been doing a fantastic job FreelanceWizard (odd calling you that...).

 

People running things do not get enough credit. And unfortunately sometimes only grief.

 

So thanks!

[Erik Mynhier]

We're all in this together L'yhta. Do you have assistant mods or something to help you out or are you doing this solo? Also I second Nat, maybe a donation option to limit ads. This is our community, it shouldn't be all on you money wise, that isn't fair. Let us help if we can.

[TheLastCandle]

+1 for the donations suggestion. I'd be willing for sure.

[C'kayah Polaali]

Amen. Count me in.

[Zhavi]

You're a cool guy.

 

Like Nat said, if you can't find that high performance cloud storage thing on the cheap, could we try doing a community paypal or whatever?

[Kage]

I would be glad to help! <3

[Sophia_Grave]

As far as I'm concerned, you have nothing to apologize for concerning said topic. Regardless of whatever disagreements are going on, it was a topic worth discussing in its own right. 

 

Also, donations for the site sounds like a great idea! We should totally do that.

[ArmachiA]

As far as I'm concerned, you have nothing to apologize for concerning said topic. Regardless of whatever disagreements are going on, it was a topic worth discussing in its own right. 

 

Also, donations for the site sounds like a great idea! We should totally do that.

 

I agree I believe it was worth discussing and it was a shame it devolved.

 

A donation is probably the best idea, i'm sure you can wrangle up quite a bit of money to keep the site ad free

[Melkire]

/wouldDonate

[Brynhilde]

Just point me at the collections box, I'll help.

[Roswyn]

I think it was obvious from the context that you didn't mean it quite the way people took it. Took on a little life of its own <3

[FreelanceWizard]

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.

 

[HonZoMon]

If there was an option for it, I would have donated already.  Totally worth it.

[Kage]

*gives RPC massages*

[Berrod Armstrong]

You could do a donation system. I would be more than willing to help support the site financially. I would much rather do that then have adds.

 

Thisssss!