OneGuyFromBarlick

I thought that as we have had a serious reworking of the site onto a new platform that it would be a good idea to update the membership of the current state of the finances. Also to explain the costings involved in maintaining the site as we know it. Last finance report was up to the 25th March 2020 so I will start from there:

Income

Donations received up to 1pm today (15) : £425.00

Paypal Fees: -£18.35

Net Balance after deductions: £406.65

Opening Balance brought forward: £1.58

Total income : £408.23


Outgoings

Quarterly Hosting Fees

Jun: £40.00
Sep: £40.00

Total Hosting Fees for period: -£80.00

Site repair fees paid to phpBB Services

$30 - An hour of analysis and trial to see what was needed
$40 - Upgrade phpBB 3.2.5 to 3.3.1
$25 - Re-hosting fee (half charge because I did not move the files, just the database)
$15 - Upgrade phpBB Gallery to 3.2.2
$15 - Upgrade Advanced BBCode Box to 3.2.4
$15 - Upgrade Auto DB Backup to 2.1.0-rc11
$15 - Tweak style to replicate logo

Total $155.00

Converting to US Dollars, including currency conversion fees: -£126.06 (no PayPal fees on this transaction)

Total outgoings: -£206.06

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Income: £408.23
Expenditure: -£206.06
Current balance in the sites PayPal account: £202.17


Mark at phpBB Services charges $30 per hour for his time, this is reasonable for the skills involved. He has fixed prices for commonly undertaken tasks such as extension upgrades, domain transfer, re-hosting etc. You will see that the re-hosting fee was halved because I undertook the data transfer from its original location in the shared resource area of the hosting site to the new Virtual Server instance where the site is now running from.

I made the decision to move to a higher tier of hosting as we had little choice. The database that supports the site was held in 1GB of storage space and had reached it's limit. There was no option to increase the storage space for the database so the options available were quite limited if we were to keep all the existing data. It would have been relatively easy to install a new deployment of the site but that would loose the last 8 years of site data. We would have a new 1GB database to play with but nothing else, archive site, gone, LTP2013 gone, 150,000 posts and over 20,000 images, no members unless they re-registered, you should get the picture.

The new VPS lives in the cloud or to be more specific in a UK data centre in an SSD memory bank. The shared hosting where the domain lived before is in Germany and is probably racks and racks of Hard Disk drives. So from that point of view as Dorothy would say, we sure ain't in Kansas any more!

The VPS is a scalable solution as it is just memory. The server is not physical it is a virtual one which makes it a lot faster than a hardware based system. The database, system files and all the site data, posts, images, the whole job lot is now held in the cloud. The scale of server I signed up for gives us the equivalent of an 80GB Hard Drive. The system files for the server instance claim about 3GB and the site after 8 years of data stands at about 55GB so we have just over 20GB to play with. The plus factor of a scalable solution is that you can expand the memory allocation at any time on the fly. So as the site grows we can just upgrade to a bigger memory allocation.

We currently pay about £40 per quarter for regular hosting fees. This does not include domain renewals etc but they don't happen regularly and are dated events for renewal so can be catered for, they are not an unknown quantity like a site crash. The VPS I signed us up to will cost us £5 per month extra on top of our existing hosting fees so an extra £15 per quarter. This is an introductory half price offer. After six months the fees will go up to the full price of £10 per month. We can cancel the contract without obligation within 30 days if we wish. That would put us back to square one with the site down, full database, the same dilemma we had last Saturday.

There may be opportunity to reduce the charges on our hosting fees but it needs a coat of thinking about and is beyond the immediate scope of this post.

I hope this goes some way to explaining the whys a wherefores of my thought processes. Thanks to everyone who has donated to get us out of the hole.

As usual, any questions or comments are welcome.

Let us know if and when any more is needed.

I can only speak for myself. I think everything you have laid out is sensible, your solution aided my Mark is brilliant and as fast as it has ever been. Many small glitches, that with hindsight must have been the site giving notice, have vanished and the charges for the hosting and Mark's services are very reasonable. What's not to like?
Thanks for all your work Ian, brilliant stewardship and very efficient!
[Keep us informed of the balance in our account than we can chuck money in when it is needed. You mustn't be stressed or forced to get the begging bowl out!]

When you look at the entertainment value together with the therapeutic value of letting off steam, both inside and outside the shed, it works out at about 0.001 penny a minute. Fantastic value that even the most careful Yorkshire man can't grumble about, Well nearly can't grumble.

plaques wrote: ↑24 Sep 2020, 07:34 Fantastic value that even the most careful Yorkshire man can't grumble about, Well nearly can't grumble.

Well observed Ken, we always reserve the right to grumble, even about nowt.

Stanley and Plaques have said it all for me - you've done a great job Ian and you've explained it all clearly in your excellent report above. We should kick out Dido Harding and put you in charge of Test & Trace!

No, don't do that! We need him here looking after us.