News: January Fundraising Drive

Hamma · 2013-01-10, 11:57 AM

http://www.planetside-universe.com/n...drive-2929.htm

It's that time again here at PSU! We have had quite a bit of new traffic over the past several months and introduced some new features that have increased our costs. As a result we are kicking off another Fundraiser to support the site!

As you know we at PlanetSide Universe are 100% community run and supported. This means that we have no advertisements and all of our support comes from donations and from the PSU Staff. Our main cost at this time is bandwidth that is steadily rising due to the release of Stat Signatures and in increase in usage of our Wiki. At the time of writing this news post we support over 3,000 statistic signatures. Last month we did about 850GB of data transfer whereas the previous month we did 550.

We have decided to do a donation drive with a goal of $1800! This will support us (at our current costs) for about 6 months, in addition to what remains from our previous donations that's about 7 months if costs remain the same. This money supports all of our services, domain registrations and any other costs that may arise as part of operating PSU's services. All donators will get marked as contributors on the forums and those who donate $100 or more will receive a gold username on the forums. Contributors are also able to see post counts and do a few other small things. We plan to add more features for contributors at some point in the near future. If you have suggestions for contributor features let us know!

Hit up the PayPal donation button over on the left side of the front page or in <a href="http://www.planetside-universe.com/news-january-fundraising-drive-2929.htm]http://www.planetside-universe.com/news-january-fundraising-drive-2929.htm">this news post</a>! Be sure that when you donate <a href="/profile.php?do=editpassword">you use the same e-mail</a> as you have registered here on PSU so we know who to mark as a contributor.

Hamma · 2013-01-10, 11:58 AM

As promised from the news post I wanted to go into a bit more detail about what we are running behind the scenes. We utilize the Cloud for all of our services. We currently run two web hosts with Apache/memcached. In front of this is a Cloud Load Balancer that balances traffic between our two web servers. This allows us to perform maintenance with less downtime AND it gives us the ability to add another server if we need to. It's also given us quite a bit more responsiveness during high traffic spikes which often occur when the Game Servers are offline. Our new Signature service also runs on the two web servers where we cache stat signatures for a period of time in static files replicated between two servers. We currently support over 3,000 stat signatures.

We also run a pretty low cost server for IRC - it barely breaks $20 a month and gets a fair bit of use.

On the Database side we utilize Cloud Databases. The reason we utilize this (it's a bit higher cost product) is during some of our major traffic spikes we encountered bottlenecks on our little mySQL server. This allows us to run an already optimized database on a faster storage infrastructure. We can also expand disk space as needed.

AnamNantom · 2013-01-10, 03:29 PM

Originally Posted by Hamma

As promised from the news post I wanted to go into a bit more detail about what we are running behind the scenes. We utilize the Cloud for all of our services. We currently run two web hosts with Apache/memcached. In front of this is a Cloud Load Balancer that balances traffic between our two web servers. This allows us to perform maintenance with less downtime AND it gives us the ability to add another server if we need to. It's also given us quite a bit more responsiveness during high traffic spikes which often occur when the Game Servers are offline. Our new Signature service also runs on the two web servers where we cache stat signatures for a period of time in static files replicated between two servers. We currently support over 3,000 stat signatures.

We also run a pretty low cost server for IRC - it barely breaks $20 a month and gets a fair bit of use.

On the Database side we utilize Cloud Databases. The reason we utilize this (it's a bit higher cost product) is during some of our major traffic spikes we encountered bottlenecks on our little mySQL server. This allows us to run an already optimized database on a faster storage infrastructure. We can also expand disk space as needed.

Ahh memcached! Many large sites run it! I've had to enable support for it on a few servers recently.

Hamma · 2013-01-10, 12:20 PM

Already two donations! thanks guys

OpolE · 2013-01-10, 12:22 PM

How much persuasion does PSU have over SOE making Planetside1 F2P?

Ghryphen · 2013-01-10, 12:27 PM

Originally Posted by OpolE

How much persuasion does PSU have over SOE making Planetside1 F2P?

Same as you

Mastachief · 2013-01-10, 12:28 PM

I'll throw some cash your way next weekend. The $100 thing is that total or as a one of payment?

Ghryphen · 2013-01-10, 12:30 PM

Originally Posted by Mastachief

I'll throw some cash your way next weekend. The $100 thing is that total or as a one of payment?

It's cumulative

Hamma · 2013-01-10, 02:31 PM

Yep!

Up to $215!

maradine · 2013-01-10, 02:43 PM

/tips hat

Keep it classy, gents.

Rivenshield · 2013-01-10, 02:42 PM

I threw in a buck. *Everybody* can afford a buck. They add up fast if people are conscientious about it.

Hamma · 2013-01-10, 02:56 PM

Up to $466!

vipjerry · 2013-01-10, 03:54 PM

Its insane to know that after so many years and after all you have done for this game, SOE didn't think they should offer you money for your hosting. When i think again they dont care about own game so why should they bother to pay for some "unknown" website hosting problems...

ShadetheDruid · 2013-01-10, 03:58 PM

Originally Posted by vipjerry

Its insane to know that after so many years and after all you have done for this game, SOE didn't think they should offer you money for your hosting. When i think again they dont care about own game so why should they bother to pay for some "unknown" website hosting problems...

Probably not the best idea. Considering i've seen people say that SOE secretly pays Hamma money to say what they want, imagine what it would be like if they did actually contribute.

maradine · 2013-01-10, 04:21 PM

Originally Posted by vipjerry

Its insane to know that after so many years and after all you have done for this game, SOE didn't think they should offer you money for your hosting. When i think again they dont care about own game so why should they bother to pay for some "unknown" website hosting problems...

SOE has provided extraordinary access to PSU. Communications, in-person visits, data access and support . . .

Back on your meds, mate. This isn't that thread.