Dude, Wheres My Donations Link?

[irokin]

So a few people have asked the question recently about donations and I thought I'd post this just to let the wide community know what the deal is.

 

First, I feel I should explain why I took the donations link down. It would have happened around September last year, when I did a major software update and didn't restore it. A few years ago (2007ish) Rollaclub was less than 1/4 the size it is now. We used very little hosting resources and thus the cost was very low. The few donations we received covered the costs comfortably. A year later we had doubled in size and so had the hosting costs. I think this is roughly when I started running with some advertising trying to bridge the gap between donations, some funds from stickers and what I was paying personally each month. To be honest, Google Adsense payouts are pretty shit. The advertisers certainly were doing better out of it than we ever did.

 

Then in mid 2009 I was contacted by Sean from go2space. What they were offering compared to Google was a giant slayer. I was a bit skeptical to be honest, but they were good to their word. In April of 2010 we had enough funding to move off the slow crappy shared hosting we had been on and move to much faster rented equipment (sprinter.rollaclub.com) that the sites currently running on. There was still a bit of a gap in the funds, occasionally donations filled the gap and otherwise I just threw my own cash in the gap. Late in 2010 we had enough for a second offshore server to take some of the load off sprinter (ceres.rollaclub.com, yes Ceres is a Corolla model ;)). Ceres basically handles all the heavily cachable stuff, its hosted in the US.

 

Just a quick word on go2space. I would throw your full support behind these guys where you can or feel comfortable doing so. These guys have done more for Australian forums in 2-3 years than ANYONE has ever done in the past 10 or so years that automotive forums have existed. I don't think they've ever said 'no' when I've asked for something. They were more than happy to support COTY last year and I can only imagine they will again this year. These guys are genuinely passionate about cars and they know the forum and advertising world. They've made big business sit up and take notice and we (Rollaclub and big business) benefit mutually. Now I'm not saying support them by using every single thing that's advertised here, but if they're running competitions and so forth get involved. Free stuff goddamnit!!

 

 

So advertising versus donations. Why have we gone down the advertising route. Ultimately for me it comes down to stability. Donations were too sporadic to cover costs sustainable. That's not to say I don't appreciate every single donation we ever received. Some nights when I see a whole bunch of gold names in the 'online' list it makes me really proud of the community. At first I felt like advertising was a necessary evil. I've always been conscious of not wanting the site to look like a tarted up whore of a site like the way some other forums have gone. These days I don't feel so against advertising, many of these companies have chosen to target you guys specifically. You're a valuable market to them and you should feel as though you've been given some power by them. Would I like to see Rollaclub without advertising again? Maybe, I think there's pros and cons with both ways. The funding we're getting from advertising will hopefully allow us to do some very cool things in the next 12 months, but I'll get to this later.

 

So where are we heading? Well with hosting, I'm currently gearing up for a move onto our own hardware. Last month I bought a Dell Poweredge 1950 III (2x Xeon E5435, 8GB RAM, 2x 300GB 15k RPM SAS drives). Some of you might remember I also bought a HP DL140 G3 a bit over a year ago. I wasn't comfortable with the redundancy that the HP offered. If a hard drive failed, the website would be down while I rebuild the redundant disk array. It's got a single power supply and no remote access if I accidentally lock myself out of SSH (haven't ever done it yet, but I will one day). The Dell has redundant and hot swappable (change them while the servers still running) drives and power supplies along with an out-of-band management card (this means I can control the server even while its switched off ;)). In about the next month or two the Dell (named Trueno) and the HP (named Allex, its a corolla model I swear!) will both be going into a Brisbane datacenter. We'll then be entirely on hardware owned by us and the speeds should be staggering (fastest forum in Australia? lol) along with providing us with plenty of space to expand. We're currently at about 75% disk capacity with our current server so its time to make the move before we run out (not to mention some other frustrations I'm having with the company).

 

tl;dr skip to here

So where does that leave us with donations? Well, I'm not comfortable taking donations that I don't need. Advertising is covering our hosting costs and then some. BUT that doesn't mean there isn't other things you can donate to and I certainly don't want to turn people away who want to help out Rollaclub in one way or another. Some of you may have heard about the Shitbox Rally? We're looking to enter at least one team for the 2012 event. The event raises money for the Cancer Council which is a very worthy cause. Now part of entering the event is a requirement to raise $4000 per team, can you see where I'm going with this? What I'm proposing is that instead of donating toward Rollaclub's costs, you donate towards the Rollaclub Shitbox Rally 2012 teams fundrasing.

 

Currently its looking like RC Team 1 will be Teddy and 7shades. I hear they're planning some epic stuff already ;). We'll see how we go for fundraising and whether we can support extra teams.

 

 

Donation page here: http://rollaclub.com/sbr2012.php

[7shades]

Mark my words, there will be hijinks.

[BUZ440]

I have seen the shitbox rally go through the Todd Mall in Alice Springs last year,

 

was fun and funny, might have to get me a shitbox, haha a gemini would be a start

[ke70dave]

appreciate your efforts mate.

 

keep up the good work.

[B.L.Z.BUB]

Yeah as always loving your work. :y:

[GJM85]

Go team GO!!!!

[Mason.]

might have to get me a shitbox

 

dude, don't you already have a shitty old corolla with a crappy nissan motor lying around? thats should qualify

[Raven]

Ben, part of the appeal of donating personally is the fact that you get a gold name for doing so, its make you feel like you're doing something for the community.

 

don't get me wrong, but if we wanted to reduce the advertising, a yearly and lifetime membership option with a solid monetary donation would suffice running costs of the forum I would think.

[t18drifts]

good work ;)

[parrot]

The chosen ones

[carbonboy]

don't get me wrong, but if we wanted to reduce the advertising, a yearly and lifetime membership option with a solid monetary donation would suffice running costs of the forum I would think.

 

I always wondered if there was an expiry date on the golden name, figured I'd just donate again in 12 months time? :)

 

The advertising bar at the top annoys me occasionally, but that's probably more my cruddy net connection :lol:. g2s is on my hitlist for tyres! :yes:

 

Great work guys!! All that server tech talk went straight over my head, but it sounds cool :wink:.

 

If there's hijinks happening on the Shitbox Rally, a) I'm willing to contribute provided that b) said hijinks are filmed & posted! :yes: