The future of OTF

[Gerontophile]

Can you give a ... generalisation of how much you would need per month, per head, sort of how some of us are paying for ChartMusic?

[Antepli Ejderha]

Welcome aboard loosehandlebars

[Snake Plissken]

Welcome. Good choice of biscuit.

[Sporting]

Indeed.

[ad hoc]

Welcome

[loosehandlebars]

Is this thing on? Long time lurker, first time poster I came to OTF for the football, stayed for the "World" threads, particularly those on the US election and this current folderol which I found to be the most useful filter for the avalanche of information available. Despite my committed Groucho Marxism ("I refuse to join any club", you know the rest) I've signed up to the crew so that I can make a financial contribution, monthly or annually, to help ensure the continuation of OTF. Whatever is decided is fine by me. I probably won't post too much, a year of shielding has atrophied already limited communication skills but I'll be around. Cheers.

[Cal Alamein]

I'm also on board - thanks Snake for all your hard work keeping it all going!

[diggedy derek]

Finally got a chance to check out this thread again. I'll be on board with contributing something regularly to this. As and when it's set up, I'll do it.

[gt3]

I thought about posting in a separate thread but this is a summary of where we are at.

I am looking to move OTF away from the current setup into shared hosting. Our current hosts have quoted 280 GBP / month to continue as is. That is a lot, obviously, but we are currently sitting on a dedicated, well specified server with full support, including techies on call in case of emergency. However, it is too much for our needs - it would using a Ferrari to go to the shops.

I had a look at moving to vBulletin's cloud service. This is a fully patched and maintained version of vBulletin, upgraded to the latest version automatically. Totally hands off from an admin point of view, we would just "run" OTF. The downside is that we would lose the ability to tweak OTF, including some of the mods that I have put in place like jumping to the last unread post (see the footer for an example of some of the Add-ons that we've got installed). Very vanilla, non-customisable. This would be around 70 GBP / month.

The option I am probably going for - though feel free to chip in with your thoughts - is shared hosting. Basically, we sit on a nice big server with plenty of power - however, we are sharing that server with other websites. In the real world, this isn't usually a problem, but if one of the other websites suddenly gets hammered, it might affect us for a while. If OTF starts using all the resources, the host might increase our costs to compensate. (This shouldn't happen because I've overspeccing the size and bandwidth requirements.) I've dropped an email to Zen - who I have used for years and am happy with on a cost/quality basis - to confirm that their hosting is suitable and we can shift the underlying database and webhosting to them.

For the shared and cloud options there are various add-on costs. As an indication of where things seem to be working out, it looks like the total cost of hosting and running OTF would come in a little under 1000 GBP / year. There may be some initial costs for example for transferring everything over, including the vBulletin licence but I'm not expecting that to be more than the lowish three digits.

If we look at the various options for contributions, the sums that I am using (again, indicative not exact) are a user donating 2 GBP / month = 24 / year - Patreon/Paypal commission = 20 GBP / year. If that was 2.50/month, then 30/year, 24 of which is going into OTF coffers. We could also set up a way to donate directly to the bank account or standing order and the shared hosting would give us the ability to add pages to do so.

Timeline is to have this done by the end of April. I'll work on this bit first as it is where all the ongoing costs are and sort out the paperwork for the OTF structure as we go.

Great stuff Snake. Would be happy to donate a minimum of ?30pm. If not more.

[jefe]

I just saw this and echo what Inca said: I figured some of my Patreon WSC dollars were going towards this already. I too am in for kicking in money, monthly or annually.

[Satchmo Distel]

Count me in for a monthly payment provided the mechanism is not PayPal, which my wife and I do not trust due to our personal history with it. I already have a Patreon account, as do many of us here, and the convenience justifies (or at least makes me less angry about) Patreon taking a slice.

[Sam]

Yep, thanks Snake. Sounds good.

In reply to the question on the previous page about standing orders, I haven't thought about them for years but realised the other day while transferring some cash from my banking app (building-societying app?) that the option to set up the payment as a standing order was there just before I clicked 'Confirm'. So Nationwide definitely offer it, and I'm guessing others will too.

[elguapo4]

Just let me know how much and how to pay and I'm on board with whatever is decided.

[willie1foot]

Thanks Snake... loving the work you're doing here.

[Sits]

Yeah great effort Snake. 100% happy to follow your guidance.

[hobbes]

Nice work Fella. Thank you.

[Uncle Ethan]

Thanks Snake.

[San Bernardhinault]

Yeah. You're a star for sorting this, Snake, and I am happy to defer to you (and others) who are way more knowledgeable about this stuff than me.

[ad hoc]

Thanks Snake. That's a clear, comprehensive and comprehensible (even for me) outline. I don't really have a strong preference either way between shared and cloud, but tend to assume that if you think shared is better for us, then it is better for us

[Snake Plissken]

I thought about posting in a separate thread but this is a summary of where we are at.

I am looking to move OTF away from the current setup into shared hosting. Our current hosts have quoted 280 GBP / month to continue as is. That is a lot, obviously, but we are currently sitting on a dedicated, well specified server with full support, including techies on call in case of emergency. However, it is too much for our needs - it would using a Ferrari to go to the shops.

I had a look at moving to vBulletin's cloud service. This is a fully patched and maintained version of vBulletin, upgraded to the latest version automatically. Totally hands off from an admin point of view, we would just "run" OTF. The downside is that we would lose the ability to tweak OTF, including some of the mods that I have put in place like jumping to the last unread post (see the footer for an example of some of the Add-ons that we've got installed). Very vanilla, non-customisable. This would be around 70 GBP / month.

The option I am probably going for - though feel free to chip in with your thoughts - is shared hosting. Basically, we sit on a nice big server with plenty of power - however, we are sharing that server with other websites. In the real world, this isn't usually a problem, but if one of the other websites suddenly gets hammered, it might affect us for a while. If OTF starts using all the resources, the host might increase our costs to compensate. (This shouldn't happen because I've overspeccing the size and bandwidth requirements.) I've dropped an email to Zen - who I have used for years and am happy with on a cost/quality basis - to confirm that their hosting is suitable and we can shift the underlying database and webhosting to them.

For the shared and cloud options there are various add-on costs. As an indication of where things seem to be working out, it looks like the total cost of hosting and running OTF would come in a little under 1000 GBP / year. There may be some initial costs for example for transferring everything over, including the vBulletin licence but I'm not expecting that to be more than the lowish three digits.

If we look at the various options for contributions, the sums that I am using (again, indicative not exact) are a user donating 2 GBP / month = 24 / year - Patreon/Paypal commission = 20 GBP / year. If that was 2.50/month, then 30/year, 24 of which is going into OTF coffers. We could also set up a way to donate directly to the bank account or standing order and the shared hosting would give us the ability to add pages to do so.

Timeline is to have this done by the end of April. I'll work on this bit first as it is where all the ongoing costs are and sort out the paperwork for the OTF structure as we go.

[Antepli Ejderha]

Thanks Snake.

[Sporting]

Just waiting.

[Snake Plissken]

Just waiting. I’ll be putting up the technical options and their approximate costs over the weekend.

[Sits]

At this stage, are we meant to be doing anything, or just waiting?

[superstu64]

I don't have much to add other than have you looked into something like this Snake Plissken ?

https://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=292766

The advantages as well as being a built in donate option are things like monthly goals which could show how much is needed and might encourage people to chip in a few pence, donations can be anonymous and you can set custom payment options, although it does seem to be only PayPal as the actual payment method.

Otherwise, Patreon is worth looking into as well as the Co-Op ideas, which would be cool to have proper democracy on the board and keeping it advert free.