however, gca is now getting larger and regularly bringing the server to its knees. as of today, gca has:
- 29,557 caches
- 769,644 logs
- the compressed backup of the main cache and log database is currently 145MB
- geocaching.com.au:
* 11,814 unique visitors
* 335,877 pageviews
* 1,894,079 hits
* 20GB bandwidth - forum.geocaching.com.au:
* 3,662 unique visitors
* 116,871 pageviews
* 738,589 hots
* 5GB bandwidth
the first issue is how to fund it. we think it will cost something like US$200-300 per month to provide a server of appropriate capacity (just a guess at the moment, we'll do a bit more work to understand what is required. suffice to say, it needs much more than the average shared server such as dreamhost et al) for argument's sake, let's say US$250/month = about A$4000 per year.
options to fund it include:
- i! continuing to fund it. we could claim it on tax and it would cost us $2k pa. we'd probably do that but for the fact that we haven't actually gone caching in years due to the car accident(s). very sad.
- funding by a few key interested parties, eg 20 people put in $200 per annum to keep the server running. i! could possibly underwrite this for a couple of years, ie if not enough donations, we make up the difference as it would be great to get some capacity back on our server! this may raise issues with the idea of premium members or something. personally we want gca to continue to be free and open, so we'd like to see that everyone gets equal access irrespective if they help fund it or not. actually the funding is tiny compared to the hours of work that c@w, craigrat and riblit have put in to developing and maintaining the site
- funding by lots of smaller donations, eg some kind of paypal thing for people to put in whatever they think fit. we think it would be sad for there to be threads begging for money though. there would also have to be some way of putting a cap on the funding so we don't get surpluses which then need to be looked after by someone. (it would be good to do it without having to go to the cost and hassle of forming a legal entity)
- advertisements. we hate advertisements and in fact they were one of the key drivers for setting up gca in the first place. however, it's not really up to us any more!
- have we forgotten any options?
- what do you think of the options?