"You NEVER go out to McDonalds?"

No. I buy all of my food in bulk, and it accounts for (over the last semester) 37.8% of my expenditures. (34.8% of my after tuition income goes directly to savings.) All of my personal spending, which I define as anything that isn't necessary, accounts for a whopping 8.8% of my expenditures. Miscellaneous things that are required if I want to continue functioning account for 41.4% of my expenditures. The remaining 12% is textbooks for class - I buy previous editions, used, off of Amazon, and usually save ~$600-$800 per semester doing that.

"So I take it you never date?"

I have a girlfriend, but we haven't done anything that requires an actual expenditure of money... ever.

"You never go to the movies?"

No. I haven't seen a movie in the theaters since Star Trek, and that was a gift to my mother for Mother's day.

"Never buy a book for pleasure? "

I have to confess to having bought one book in the past year that I haven't read for class. And I still haven't had time to read it.

"Never buy an ice cream cone?"

I can't remember the last time I ate ice cream.

"Never ride the bus somewhere you didn't have to go but wanted to?"

No. In fact, I bike everywhere.

So, in conclusion, fuck off. You don't know me, you don't know my situation, and you have no right to demand anything of me. I didn't come here asking for others to start a huge donation campaign, and I haven't said that I wouldn't donate myself. I likely would, if it came to that. But I think there are better ways to finance the site, which is why I started this thread. I said that for the benefit of people on this site that I'm sure are like most of my friends - who really *are* struggling to get by.

At this moment, I'm unable to donate, and side with Smiley, except for the fact that I do have money I spend on non-essential things. Not very much, but it exists.

But it's not non-essential things for me personally, which webdiplomacy is, but non-essential things for my family. I love the site and I love the community. I love my kids more. If my financial situation improves then sure I'll donate. But until then, I'll put up with all the 500 errors and not really care that much.

I would support adds:
Another site for a board game online I use has a joining system where your only allowed to join 5 new games a day. Just an idea.

There's an alternative between shared and dedicated that you're not considering. Slicehost VPS. I've worked with them, I'm a customer, and now they're owned by one of our partners. It's seriously a great service.

A 512 MB, 20GB, 300GB BW slice is $38 a month and you'd never see the kind of performance issues you see here.

Do not go dedicated. It's another hassle you don't need and its way too much for what the problem is.

Dreamhost is a stale potato crisp you find in your sofa after moving apartments compared to the lobster tails and baked potato that is Slicehost.

> Either way you do it, JUST MAKE THE DAMNED DONATE BUTTON VISIBLE
> ***ON EVERY PAGE*** at the bottom, top, side, WHEVERER!
We don't need donations now, and I don't think we could count on donations for our hosting. If I put it up everywhere saying "sick of 500 errors? donate now" and got $500 in the first week that wouldn't say much about what it would yield over the following months after we've moved and everyone is happy and all donated out.

Either way you should relax about it, we've had brief periods of overly frequent 500 errors before, they come up every few months then go away, and I've contacted support about it. Even on dedicated hosting there are routing issues, problems stemming from having to do your own software updates / maintenance, etc, nothing is perfect and DH isn't bad for what we need. Pressuring people into donating really doesn't accomplish anything; we don't need donations now, and pressured donations would give an unreliable indication of a sustainable monthly budget

> There's an alternative between shared and dedicated that you're not considering.
> Slicehost VPS. I've worked with them, I'm a customer, and now they're owned by
> one of our partners. It's seriously a great service.
>
> A 512 MB, 20GB, 300GB BW slice is $38 a month and you'd never see the kind of
> performance issues you see here.
Those figures are pretty stingy compared to what you get from DH, that disk space constraint in particular would be a problem. Bear in mind it's ~$45 for a dedicated machine with 1024MB, 160GB, 5000GB BW at http://www.leaseweb.com/en/dedicated-servers/dual-core-servers

Also the devil is in the details with VPSs (and DH does offer VPSs fyi); they might give you more memory but if you're running out of memory because processes aren't getting dispatched fast enough due to a shared disk / CPU being hogged then more memory just means requests will hang for longer before the limit is reached and 500 errors appear.

You say there are no issues, but there's no way to have shared hosting where two users are on one piece of hardware, yet one user can't affect the other.
You could have better detection of over-usage, or put fewer people on the same machines, but these would decrease the likelihood and not remove the possibility.
If there's a similar size site which is similarly database intensive etc hosted on a Slicehost VPS without any issues maybe it's on a quiet server while we're on a server that's filling up; after jumping through half a dozen hosts (and having 20 months of DH hosting left) I'm very reluctant to gamble that another shared/VPS host is better (especially since DH is pretty good, relatively speaking)

Thanks for the recommendation though

Ah did not know you had a long contract.

So... 600 bucks for a dedicated machine per year?

I could probably pay that by myself, so I'm a bit curious why donations from multiple people won't cover it.

Because donations are not constant nor reliable.
The entire website cannot depend on one or more persons pledging money. In the event they decide not to pay? Kestas pays large fees and the site shuts down.

Oh, I am well aware of the fact that you can't base a site on a single donor, I was just wondering why it is that a large user base can't reach a predictable average.

If it comes to a few people paying for a better host, then they might as well buy the hosting themselves, install the open source software, and run the site themselves. If webDip problems continue or get worse, the migration would not be difficult to encourage.

God damn it. I'm on the sitting account again.
Need a sticky note not to troll forums until I check to know what account I'm on.

Please forgive me. The views expressed above were my own. Not BC's.
I don't normally have this issue. So very tired. Good night!

Kestas has said that donations can be unreliable....
But just maybe if we did consider moving to a better more expensive server, what if we (us members) raised enough money to cover three years of fees. I would certainly be willing to pledge some money. Then after the first two years we could have another fund-raising effort. That would take care of the issue of reliability.
In the fund-raising target we should include enough money to pay for the server and give Kestas a bonus as a thank you present?
It's probably not a realistic idea, but if there was interest you can count me in.
I understand that not everyone has money (or the inclination)- naturally this would be purely voluntary.

I just donated 50 AUD. If Kestas does decide to upgrade you can put me down for another 50.

I am a socialist and I will donate 2$ (in € if possible) ;D

That was response to that hot argument on page 2

Now lets be serious. This is great site, and we all love and enjoy our time here. I am sure everyone will contribute based on their possibilities. Bravo for spyman.

Have I missed something? Kestas has set up an excellent site that is both low maintenance and cheap enough that the current funds keep it going nicely, and suddenly people start launching mass donation campaigns and insisting things should be done differently? The occasional periods of slightly increased 500 errors can be annoying, but are no great hardship.

This is Kestas' baby, and he lets us play with it and it's bloody amazing. If Kestas wishes for some help from time to time he need but ask and will certainly be overwhelmed by volunteers. But lets try to avoid the temptation of imposing our own views of what is best in somebody else's backyard.

I agree with Octomom. Anyone who doesn't like exactly how the site is run or want to suggest improvements can go fuck their collective selves and start their own server.

Oh, they should probably commit suicide as well.

I didn't mean any offense. I was just saying *if* money was the issue maybe we could figure something out. Kestas mentioned the costs if an upgrade on the other page and it didn't sound *that* expensive. But I appreciate his point about donations being unreliable. It was just a suggestion to help fix the problem of the reliability of donations. Either way I really don't mind.

@Octavious
"The occasional periods of slightly increased 500 errors can be annoying"
You're downplaying the problem to an extreme and many of us aren't people to place pots and pans under a leaking roof and call it a job well done.

@manganese
Your comment is wrong and infuriating on so many levels that I just don't care. Commit suicide for suggesting improvements? Get real child.

Sorry Geo, that was wrong of me. Of course I meant that they should be put in camps and gassed.

I think manganese was joking. He's made "suggestions to improve the site before" himself. I don't care what anyone thinks. There is nothing wrong with floating a few ideas. Occasionally a good idea sticks.

I haven't read everything but I just wanted to voice my opinion that I would not be opposed to there being a paying option on the site.

The chess site I play on (www.gameknot.com) does it quite well. You can play for free but then you are limited by the number of games and tournaments you can play at once. This allows casual players to still check out the site but provides a way of charging people who play a lot.

Even though I haven't been here long, I feel that the quality of the site would convince many people that it's worth paying.

Okay doke, it looks like we've got $254 over the last few months thanks to our donors here (which will go to the next set of hosting fees here, if not to a dedicated server).

The least expensive server that I think would run webDip (the second least expensive) is a Core 2 Duo T5500, 2GB ram, 160GB space, 5000GB/mo bandwidth
It's $782 for 2 years, I'll put $150 towards it, we've got $254, which leaves a $378 shortfall

I'll put a temporary notice up asking for donations and we'll see if we get there

Tried clicking on the donate button and it didn't work. Any idea why?

did not work for me either.

It didn't work for me either. Is it Paypal, and if so, is Paypal the only option?