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Author: Subject: URGENT - How much do you appreciate this site?????
pewe

posted on 3/2/13 at 12:17 PM Reply With Quote
URGENT - How much do you appreciate this site?????

Guys, you may have seen from another post Thank you Chris that ChrisW The Boss is having trouble with ISP's as well as being between jobs.
The bottom line seems to be that without increased support this website could disappear.
So here's an IMPORTANT and URGENT appeal - if you want continued, freely given advice on anything from cars to domestic queries without the edge or back-biting on a lot of other sites think about donating.
If you already donate increase the amount.
If you are one of the lurkers or guests on here then maybe you should join fully and donate.
Most donate £10 for a whole year - maybe £20 should be the norm (students and OAP's excepted - well maybe not the later as I suspect there are a lot on here!) after all you'd probably spend that for one evening down the pub or out for one nosh so it's not a huge amount.
Just think about it - if this site went where would you go?
We'd all be like refugees - siteless, homeless and with no-where to go.
What I do know is that my build would have been a lot harder without this site and it continues to be a source of entertainment and advice.

So come on, put your hands in your pockets and press the Paypal button at the top of the page.

BTW before any-one thinks or suggests it I have no relation with ChrisW - financial or otherwise but really appreciate his efforts.

Cheers, Pewe10

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maccmike

posted on 3/2/13 at 12:36 PM Reply With Quote
I thoroughly appreciate this site, I mostly enjoy looking at peoples builds and Iv seeked a little advice, some of which has been answered but your suggesting 18000 members should pay £20 each? Does it really cost that much to run a website?

[Edited on 3/2/13 by maccmike]

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chillis

posted on 3/2/13 at 12:44 PM Reply With Quote
have already increased donation





Never under estimate the ingenuity of an idiot!

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bob

posted on 3/2/13 at 12:47 PM Reply With Quote
I hope i'm not going to end up paying for more flying lessons






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phelpsa

posted on 3/2/13 at 12:53 PM Reply With Quote
quote:
Originally posted by maccmike
I thoroughly appreciate this site, I mostly enjoy looking at peoples builds and Iv seeked a little advice, some of which has been answered but your suggesting 18000 members should pay £20 each? Does it really cost that much to run a website?

[Edited on 3/2/13 by maccmike]


There's only a couple of hundred regular users of the site. Chris estimates £200 a month in costs.

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mads

posted on 3/2/13 at 12:55 PM Reply With Quote
quote:
Originally posted by maccmike
I thoroughly appreciate this site, I mostly enjoy looking at peoples builds and Iv seeked a little advice, some of which has been answered but your suggesting 18000 members should pay £20 each? Does it really cost that much to run a website?

[Edited on 3/2/13 by maccmike]


No, it doesnt cost £360,000 a year but it is costing a few thousand pound per year

Plus, not all the 18,000 members are using the site on a daily basis or at all - some are members who registered once or no longer use the site. I'd be interested to know how many active members the site has interestingly.

Also, many contributors probably donated when they first signed up and may not have done since. Obviously the cost of running the site is recurring so the initial donations wont be covering it today.

Have donated again as not done it for a little while

Edit: I do think the increase to £20 is probably not necessary and a tenner each would soon have things covered.

[Edited on 3/2/13 by mads]





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monck

posted on 3/2/13 at 12:55 PM Reply With Quote
So your suggesting 18551 members at £20 a year that's some serious money ...

Anyway i do appreciate this site and personal donated the £10 and also i have bought a site t-shirt and if it came down to it id donate more but with the amount of members we have even £10 should be enough per year ?

I don't know how many of the 18551 members have paid even £10 but if there is an issue maybe giving the people who haven't donated a cap on the number of posts there allowed ect before donating like some other websites could be an idea ..

Because if you say £20 i bet most the people who have paid £10 will pay £20 and all the ones who never donated wont if that makes sense ..

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Staple balls

posted on 3/2/13 at 01:05 PM Reply With Quote
I've not donated in a while, will chuck a tenner in next time I get paid.

I wonder if the manufacturers represented on the site might not find it beneficial to donate, certainly as far as I'm concerned LCB is first line support, rather than mk. Gotta be cheaper to keep this place going for a decade than paying a competent individual to sit by the phone answer all the questions that this place does.

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Slater

posted on 3/2/13 at 01:11 PM Reply With Quote
Its a great site, I'm on it every day. Just made a donation, last one was about 5 yrs ago. Hopefully Chris will continue his good work.
SL8R





Why do they call Port Harcourt "The Garden City"?...... Becauase they can't spell Stramash.

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AndyW

posted on 3/2/13 at 01:20 PM Reply With Quote
wonder how much revenue the advertisments bring in?

I have just deleted what I had replied as it will only provoke negative response. If the site needs more money then the site owner should ask, not just members who have nowt to do with the site's running costs.

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cosmick

posted on 3/2/13 at 01:26 PM Reply With Quote
Personally, I think this is the best kit car forum as it brings all makes and thoughts together. I subscribe to the WSCC annually and I wouldn't mind doing the same for this one. OK we don't receive a magazine so the costs would be lower but as has already been said, where would we be without this website.

I would quite happily pay £10.00 per year to use this site.





If it can't be fixed with a hammer then its probably an electrical problem.

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Ben_Copeland

posted on 3/2/13 at 01:32 PM Reply With Quote
I donated again last night





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Slimy38

posted on 3/2/13 at 01:40 PM Reply With Quote
I was planning to donate as I'm about to start my build and it seems like the right time to start helping, but I want the money to go to Chris rather than his ISP?

Is the current link 'safe', IE the money will go to the right place?

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Dangle_kt

posted on 3/2/13 at 01:57 PM Reply With Quote
Top up donation done
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parkiboy

posted on 3/2/13 at 02:22 PM Reply With Quote
quote:
Originally posted by phelpsa
quote:
Originally posted by maccmike
I thoroughly appreciate this site, I mostly enjoy looking at peoples builds and Iv seeked a little advice, some of which has been answered but your suggesting 18000 members should pay £20 each? Does it really cost that much to run a website?

[Edited on 3/2/13 by maccmike]


There's only a couple of hundred regular users of the site. Chris estimates £200 a month in costs.


That means only 240 people need to pay the 10 a year, I would be very interested to see the stats of how many people do actually donate a year, I would have thought it would be around that if not more already? And not to mention the advertising revenue.

If your asking for more money I think the users should be entitled to see the incomes and outcomes of the site over the last year or so.

I will happily pay the tenner a year and I appreciate all the work it takes to keep it up and running but I do think 20 a year from all the regular members will be turn more into an income rather than covering maintenance fees

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bi22le

posted on 3/2/13 at 02:28 PM Reply With Quote
i use the site everyday and have paid when i registered. not been asked since.

if i get a formal request to fund then ill gladly do so.





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Dick Axtell

posted on 3/2/13 at 03:00 PM Reply With Quote
quote:
Originally posted by phelpsa
quote:
Originally posted by maccmike
Does it really cost that much to run a website?
[Edited on 3/2/13 by maccmike]


There's only a couple of hundred regular users of the site. Chris estimates £200 a month in costs.


£200 per month??? I run an enthusiasts website, (on the proverbial shoe-string), complete with discussion forum, although that's someone else's responsibility (BoardNation.com). Sure doesn't cost me that much, BUT - otoh, it isn't used as heavily as this site, nor does it carry as much uploaded images.

So, because its THE place to go to, for useful info, buying those useful odds-n-ends, and not least, for that all-important encouragement, I'd be happy to make an annual contribution. Heading for the PayPal button now.





Work-in-Progress: Changed to Zetec + T9. Still trying!!

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ChrisLeary

posted on 3/2/13 at 03:03 PM Reply With Quote
I check the site atleast once daily and I would happily subscribe to a £2 a month scheme. If only 100 people signed up we could atleast cover the costs of the site.

As above though, I paid when I registered and I didn't realise it was a requirement to donate every year.

Don't get me wrong I will happily donate if we it means we don't loose the forum.

Best regards,

Chris

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b14wrc

posted on 3/2/13 at 03:06 PM Reply With Quote
As above, I didn't relise the donations were so important.

I've just sent my money. I would hate to loose this forum. I use it every day. It's a great resource.

Cheers Chris.





20vt powered rear engined locost

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James

posted on 3/2/13 at 03:11 PM Reply With Quote
Just donated my £20

first time I've donated for years but the site is fantastic so well worth it.

The easily £20 a year to be saved by having access to the for Sale items as soon as they appear!

Cheers,
James





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theprisioner

posted on 3/2/13 at 03:15 PM Reply With Quote
Added my contribution. I thing this site is unique and invaluable to my build
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ChrisW

posted on 3/2/13 at 03:27 PM Reply With Quote
Hi All

I spotted an influx of donations this morning so I thought someone must have put one of these threads up! Thank you to the OP

To answer a couple of things that have been raised...

First, and most important, there is absolutely no requirement to donate. It is entirely up to you. If you chose to give something, do so within your means and without detriment to yourself or your family. There is no minimum requirement and I won't tell anyone who has donated what - not even Fozzie knows! You'll get the '9 stars' whether you donate 1p or £1m.

Second, yes the donate button goes to me, once Paypal have taken their cut of course!

Third, if you don't want to donate money there are other ways you can help the site, and help encourage me to keep putting in the effort. Some ideas are towards the end of this post.

Some background:

The new hosting is costing around £200/month. The actual bill is about twice that, plus VAT, but I have a couple of my own things hosted too, including the 'live backup' system in a separate data centre in a different part of the country that has ensured we have not lost a single post despite all this disruption, so the £200 is a guess. I also laid out £300-odd in setup fees for the new hosting.

On top of that, this week I have shelled out £1000 on new server hardware after the old systems were stolen by the previous ISP. There is an ongoing legal case with regard to this so I can't say too much, but it's obvious that it will take some time to get the machines back and I wasn't going to leave the site down whilst this goes on so have made other arrangements.

One machine arrived late last week and I'm working on it now, and have been most of the weekend. There are something like 50GB of photos to move over and another couple of GB of database, so it's not a quick process. I expect to do the final move over later today.

The other one, which will handle mail, phones (including the verification), etc, I'm expecting tomorrow. Hopefully I'll get the bulk of the initial work done tomorrow and drive it over to the data centre either tomorrow evening or Tuesday morning. It will then probably be another day of work to get it up and running again, and then likely troubleshooting when you lot point out things I've missed.

Don't forget that I'd already migrated us once at the end of last week when the original systems were switched off. I needed a 'quick fix' whilst I made the rest of the arrangements. This is why the site has been a bit slow and some of the features haven't been working for the past 10 days or so. I preferred to have a limited version of the site up rather than total blackout! I had to pay for those temporary arrangements too.

So, taking a view of the last 10 days and the next couple, we're looking at something like £1600 paid out, about 30 hours work and 100 miles driven. In the last 24 hours I've had around £350 worth of donations after Paypal fees.

Yes, I make a bit on the adverts. Yes, I get a bit from the sponsors (Machine Mart and 2Gether Insurance). Yes, I get a few donations a month, but ultimately it's a labour of love, and I do it because I appreciate how many people enjoy using the site. I have never asked anyone for financial support and I have resisted the suggestions to put restrictions on those that chose not to pay. It is entirely up to you to donate if you wish. It always has been, and it always will be.

Ok, your efforts are more appreciated at the moment as I'm currently unemployed, but again it's entirely up to you. I'm not going to let something as minor as losing my job spoil a 12-year tradition!

So there we go... I don't think any of this will come as a surprise to the regular members, and I hope I've made it clear that nobody is under any obligation to contribute.

Some other things you can do that would show your appreciation:

- "Like" LocostBuilders on Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/locostbuilders. Talk about the site in your status, tell people what you think. You can even add me as a friend if you like. All these things help create awareness in the site, cause people to visit, and subsequently the Google adverts to pay more. It's also a huge boost to my ego to see the hit rate rising!

- Pass any hosting, voip, network admin or general IT work my way, or at least let me quote for it and compare with what you are currently paying. Other than the last 10 days of events out of my control LB has been as close to 100% reliable as realistically possible over the last 10+ years. That should be a shining example of how well I can manage a hosting platform!

- Help raise awareness for the site in other ways, for example linking us from other forums. Posting links to adverts placed here in other forum's equivalents of 'Bargains Elsewhere' is an easy way of doing this.

- Talk about interesting topics on here. Don't worry if they are no locost related - we're all similar minded people and you are bound to find someone wanting to chat about most engineering related subjects, and occasionally about other stuff.

That's about it... aka I've waffled on long enough now! As always, you know where I am if you have any queries on the above.

Chris





My gaff my rules

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andy188

posted on 3/2/13 at 03:44 PM Reply With Quote
added contrubution,

on here every day, great site, very helpfull,
know how much i value your opions/ thoughts, advise etc.
sorry, dont understand all the computer jargon, ( sounds like chris is here there and everywhere keeping this site running).
we must help keep this site running, where would we all go??

andy

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coyoteboy

posted on 3/2/13 at 03:52 PM Reply With Quote
Jesus, why is the hosting costing that much? I run a site similarly sized and populated (at one time) to this and it costs us £85 a year for unlimited bandwidth, storage space, email forwarding and database use!?

Sure it's not a dedicated server (I'm guessing it's a virtual server on a bank of hardware) but it's doing just fine. (Downtime that I'm aware of its about 6 minutes in the 4 years I've been running it)

[Edited on 3/2/13 by coyoteboy]

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ChrisW

posted on 3/2/13 at 04:36 PM Reply With Quote
quote:
Originally posted by coyoteboy
Jesus, why is the hosting costing that much? I run a site similarly sized and populated (at one time) to this and it costs us £85 a year for unlimited bandwidth, storage space, email forwarding and database use!?

Sure it's not a dedicated server (I'm guessing it's a virtual server on a bank of hardware) but it's doing just fine. (Downtime that I'm aware of its about 6 minutes in the 4 years I've been running it)

[Edited on 3/2/13 by coyoteboy]


...and here lies the problem with the web hosting market today. Unlimited simply isn't possible. Everything costs money, the company are just taking a risk that you just put your personal website on it and not a site like this that chews through those resources. If you do, they'll simply void the contract under the acceptable use policy. I've been in the industry for 10 years so trust me on this one!

If you've got a low volume site and are happy to sit on a server with 1000 other sites all competing for the resources, disk space, bandwidth, etc, then yes you can achieve a price point like that. That's not the game I'm prepared to play though.

This site is always fast, always reliable, and always available.

It runs on an HP DL360, dual quad-core Xeons, 16GB RAM, 6x2.5" SAS drives on hardware RAID. It has dual PSUs, ILO, and all the other bits required to achieve 99.999% reliability.

We need this because we have something like 50GB of images, 1.5m unique posts, and generate around 100k page views per day.

On top of that we're running Sphinx to make searching fast and effective, memcached to further improve page load times, and a whole bunch of custom scripts and cron jobs to keep everything in order. It is all tuned for maximum performance meaning there is no slowdown of the site during peak hours. All this stuff simply isn't possible on a shared hosting platform such as what you describe.

It's worth noting that the site HAS been on a virtual server for the last 10 days or so. It was a temporary measure whilst I made the new arrangements. It has been slow as hell at peak times and that's without things like search adding additional load. It has also dropped to 'read only filesystem' twice during that time (I suspect due to high load) and the ISP tried to suspend it due to it consuming too many resources.

Sorry to rant, you've somewhat touched a nerve here!





My gaff my rules

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