As many of you may already know, regular donations are what keep Fybertech afloat. Boris and Vito in particular have gone out of their way to ensure that things keep trucking along for the last few years, for which I'm sure we're all grateful. Last year, in fact, Boris decided to splurge and sent an entire year's worth of what he'd normally have donated all at once, and this earned us a 20% increase of disk space through the company that Fybertech's server is hosted at. That being the fine folks at
Linode.
Now normally I wouldn't do this, but the time for ackshun is approaching, so I thought I'd make folks aware of what's pending. Basically, Boris isn't going to be able to cover an entire year of his usual donations up front this time around. This doesn't mean that Fybertech is in sudden peril, because both Boris and Vito will surely continue to help out regularly as they've so thankfully done so far. But what this means for Fybertech is that we have to switch back to monthly payments, which unfortunately means that we have to give up our 20% of extra disk space.
In case you're wondering what good that space is to Fybertech, currently 2.3GB of 4get's 5.4GB of content rests there. As does all approximately 600MB of 4thread. It's proven useful for other things as well, like for temporary hosting and storage purposes and such. And who knows what other user-contributable creation(s) will sprout up in the future that would need such space. Fybertech says "disk space taste good om nom". That's a direct quote, too. I asked it.
Losing the extra disk space won't mean the end of 4get or 4thread, but they're obviously going to get pretty heavily pruned. I lack the disk space on the backup server to grab those sections of the site when doing regular backups, so those images will pretty much be gawn. It's not a huge loss, no, but space will be tighter in general. They'd have had to be pruned eventually anyway, just probably not this drastically.
So, how much exactly is needed to keep things going like they are? And by when? Oh, it's
just $250. And it's due September 1st. Yeah, not a small sum, which is why kudos go to Boris for covering that as well as the .com domain renewal last year which also came due at the same time (and will again this year). Problem is, to change billing plans back to monthly, I'll probably have to do it around the end of this month so that things will be set by the time the due date rolls around. So that gives us about two weeks to decide what we want to do here.
I don't like asking folks for money, and still won't ask outright, but I thought I'd point out the situation and see what folks wanted to do. If the consensus is "who cares", then it's no big deal, I'll do a truffle shuffle with the site contents and we'll work it out. If keeping the space and everything assocated with it is preferred, then obviously some much appreciated donations would be required. But it's up to you guys! Feel free to comment or discuss things here in the topic. Or if you want to shove greenbacks on me immediately, check the FAQ section for the Paypal link, or PM me I guess for an address if you do snail mail. No flaming poop on porch though kthx.
