Seeing what comes in and what goes out involving running RMRK is easy, since the only money received online is from Google AdSense and the donations, and likewise the only money that goes out online is towards the machine that's serving you this very page and things that run on or related to it.
One such thing is domain names, a bunch of which were renewed and are now good till well into next year.
As for the server itself, RMRK runs on a
VPS/VDS from the fine folks at
ServInt, and you may remember
this news post back in january where we moved up to a more powerful one.
This fixed the occasional speed problems cropping up every now and then, but is also what bumped up our running costs to
the $100/mo mark. For a site that makes as little as RMRK, that's not so pleasant, and it quickly became obvious that donations would have to play a bigger part in survival.
You guys definitely came through, we sailed through the January & February $89/mo bills as well as renewing domains, which sucked up all the donations and also most of the cash we had left.
Moving from our old VPS into the larger one could possibly best be described as moving from a small appartment into a mansion. While we were sometimes getting cramped in the apartment, we could octuple our guests in the mansion and still hear echoes down the hallways:
Granted, that is a snapshot of right now, and is a little quiet in comparison to normal, but it's still showing underuse.
We tried various different experiments to see how we could become more efficient, and weren't without
a few bumps in the road, though it's largely a success. RMRK is now running stable on a reconfigured database as well as freshly tweaked software. It's the same optimisations that will now give you
search results quickly, taking a few seconds at max (even for queries that return more than a thousand results, try "maker") instead of sometimes
over a minute.
Now you're up to date on what's been happening, here's what is going to happen now.
Again to mention our host, ServInt, they recently boosted
every VPS offering, increasing exactly what was causing us trouble. So, increased resources, as well as optimisations to reduce our resource usage also. Do you see where this is going? =)
For a few days earlier this week, we were actually back on our old plan in order to test, and things have been peachy. I put in a request, and starting next cycle, we wil be back home in our comfy appartment. This will lower our running costs again, shaving off $40.
So what now? You may remember, if you check the
RMRK, Its finances, and you post, that we were expecting google to next fill our wallet in April, or possibly May. We hit the magic balance with google too late in february, so it will indeed come in April and cover RMRK's (
newly lowered) bills for both April and May. This just leaves us with this month's (March) bill, which is the plain old $89. Our reserve is $40 and a few cents.
.
For the tl;dr crowd: We need one last wave of support.
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