Funding GRB

[GeddyWrox]

I was very disappointed that this turned out to be an ad for a pickup truck.

[SHOW]

[heyzeus]

I was very disappointed that this turned out to be an ad for a pickup truck.

[SHOW]

Did you want to be eaten by a dinosaur?

[GeddyWrox]

I was very disappointed that this turned out to be an ad for a pickup truck.

[SHOW]

Did you want to be eaten by a dinosaur?

No, I wanted to befriend it and then hunt my enemies with it.

[TheoSqua]

GRB was banned from google adsense for "invalid traffic concerns". Looks like our spam bots got the better of our ad revenue.

We were averaging $17 a month from ads, so it wasn't really worth a lot anyway.

I don't expect to bother with ads going forward.

[Leroy]

Sonsabiches.

[AdmiralKird]

How much does it cost per month to run the site?

About $115 a month.

I'm confused how it runs this much to host GRB. Whats the monthly traffic in Terrabytes?

[TheoSqua]

How much does it cost per month to run the site?

About $115 a month.

I'm confused how it runs this much to host GRB. Whats the monthly traffic in Terrabytes?

Generally less than 1TB a month, the bandwidth isn't the bottleneck.

It's storage and ram. The only cheaper hosting option offered by the current host doesn't have enough diskspace to downgrade (I tried and it failed). And the offered RAM (2GB) of the lower tier is less than some of the peaks we get (I'm assuming it's bot traffic), so downgrading would require purging the forum and could cause site timeouts.

So the mods and I have agreed that paying the difference between the cheaper host and our current one is worth the added stability.

The other option is to find another host, but I don't own the gatewayredbirds.com domain so it would take some coordination. My plan has been to convert to a xenforo build I started on when I took over the site. Getting off phpbb onto a more efficient forum should help with both the disk space and the bot problem. But I broke the beta forum a few months ago and haven't had time to reinstall it onto the server.

I love GRB and am willing to pay the portion of hosting I do to keep the site running. But if i'm going to invest time into updating the forum and adding some content specific features, I wanted to make sure we had content creators who would take advantage of that. We had some ideas for increasing content creation, then the pandemic put a damper on some of those ideas and i was re-orged at work in a role that has crazy hours, so most of my ideas for GRB have just stagnated.

[GeddyWrox]

If I may ask, how much is the Patreon helping??

[TheoSqua]

If I may ask, how much is the Patreon helping??

We prefer to keep financial specifics private (i'm sure @heyzeus has some formal legal speak he can provide ). If anyone really wants more details PM me and I can talk to the mods about what we want to reveal.

[GeddyWrox]

Thanks theo. It's not a huge deal. I was just curious. I appreciate all the work you and the moderators do.