Special request for help with Hosting costs

[Jason]

Hi folks,

For a few years now, I've been covering the cost for the hosting of the PLUG website. I like our host, Digital Ocean,  and hosting isn't very expensive, about $7 a month. But that and the domain name ($13) amount to about $100/year.

The reason I've covered the cost of the website is that subscriptions for PLUG haven't been enough. Usually, with memberships, we take in $200-$250 a year and our yearly expenses besides the hosting are room rental ($250) and bank charges amount to $42 a year. So we're not even covering expenses not considering the website.

So I'm asking members who benefit from these forums to donate to a fund that will cover hosting for 2020. Any amount is appreciated.
If I reach the $100 goal, anything above that will go into the PLUG bank account.
If you see value in what the website offers, the forums in particular, and even just in my time involved in setting up and maintaining the site, please send along a few dollars.

You can donate via Paypal here or give me a cheque or cash at the next PLUG meeting. I also accept e-Transfer; send me an email to get my email address. If anybody still uses snail mail still, email me for my address information. I will accept donations until the $100 goal is reached.

Even though it doesn't show up fullow due to an offline donation, I have received donations totalling $60 already with 2 pledges. However, I'd like to get everyone to contribute, even if it's just $7 (one month of hosting).

Thank you! Now back to your scheduled program...

[Jason]

For those that might wonder why I don't just host the website at home, here are the reasons I don't want to go that route:

   
• IP addresses for home internet users are not static. And while there are ways to point domains to dynamic IPs for when they change, it can take time to propagate (i.e. the server might be unavailable for minutes or hours at a time)
• If there is a power outage locally or an internet outage the server will also be unavailable during that time as well as power outages risking data corruption. Hosting companies have redundant power supplies and connections to the internet.
• Hardware breaks. While it's being replaced and backups restored, the site will be down. Hosting companies have redundant equipment and can easily move VPS from one server to another with only network speeds being noticed as the change until it's moved
• Digital Ocean servers have 99.99% uptime.
• We'd be limited to a shared download speed of 10 Mbps (my internet upload speed) - this would only be a big deal if we had larger attachments but it's nice to have that option (Digital Ocean servers have 40 Gbps transfer speed)
• It would mean me having to set up the server all over again from scratch. It wasn't an inconsequential amount of time. Honestly, I'm just not willing to do that, again, at least not for a long while. I'd rather pay for it myself if it came to that. I only did it before because our previous host shut down our website because of storage space without any warning and no leeway

[Jason]

I forgot to update everyone on the result of this request until now.

I received enough donations a couple of months ago to keep the website going until the end of 2020. The fundraiser ended up with a bit over the goal of $100.

To those that contributed, thank you from the bottom of my cynical but ever so optimistically hopeful heart.