State of the Site Report!

[Eden Parker]

Hey everyone!

As you may know, it’s part of my role as Treasurer to provide a biannual report to the Board regarding the financial health of our community.

Our community charter document states that our community, Rhydin.org, belongs to everyone equally. The Board acts as financial and technical stewards. We make sure that everything is operating as needed, that we have the volunteer-staff we need, and that we have the funds we need to carry on.

In furtherance of our commitment to always be transparent with our members, we are pleased to share with you our most recent report.

While normally, I like to take this opportunity to discuss our growing membership and all the exciting things that have happened since our last report, we have a pretty important financial decision to make next month, and we have made significant financial progress since our last report, so we’d like to keep this State of the Site focused just on that: the financials.

The Financials

At the time of our last report, our account balance was $55. I am pleased to report that thanks to the generosity of many site members who responded to our call for donations last September, we currently have a balance of $733.93. This reflects the total donations we have received since our last report (22 individual transactions) less PayPal’s per transaction fee* which totaled $26.37.

The current balance also reflects our most recent spending: the renewal of our domain, rhydin.org at a cost of $24.90. However, we have a pretty big expense coming up in the next couple months.

Hosting Service Renewal

As we noted in our last report, our server renewal period is rapidly approaching in October 2021. Hosting services are essential to what makes our community special. The service hosts both our website and forums, and provides the connection between the bot and our dueling profiles.

To date, server hosting is our community’s most significant expense. As you may recall, in 2018 we first established the server on A2 Hosting by securing a relatively low, three-year introductory rate of $201.12, paid for primarily through staff donations.

Thanks to some technical expertise from Kal who spotted a good deal, we now plan to upgrade to a new service plan at A2 called the Drive plan. Because it’s a new plan, we will fortunately be able to secure another three-year introductory rate. This is a technical upgrade but it’s even lower than our last rate! We will be renewing for three years at a rate of $179.64.

For the most part, we have been satisfied with A2’s service. We had some initial issues back in 2018/2019 with slow response times and issues with the site failing to load. While it did take some back-and-forth with A2’s support, it appears that most of those issues have been resolved and service has been relatively consistent ever since.

The benefit of remaining with A2 is that we continue our service without interruption and with no technical burden on our forum/server admins who would need to guide the host transition process and troubleshoot potential issues. Additionally, with the upgraded service and the new low three-year introductory rate, we feel pretty comfortable that we’re getting good value for our dollar.

Conclusion

The ultimate decision of where our community will be hosted is made by the Board, weighing out the costs/benefits of each of our options. But we also welcome your feedback, especially if you have had any issues with our hosting company, A2. After all, this is the community’s money and we appreciate your trust in us to decide how to manage it.

We also want to take this moment to thank our donors. This was a tough year for many people and a lot of our community members faced unexpected challenges. Those who were able to offer support have helped us secure this place we love for the next several years. We couldn’t be more grateful.

While we are in a good financial position for the immediate future, we’re always preparing for the long term, the unexpected, and maybe even some wishlist items! Original art for our website? New technology features? Advertisement? Discord pay-services? Let’s be ready for Rhydin.org’s next chapter and challenges. Here is a link to our community PayPal account. You can also make donations directly to rhydinfund at gmail. The donation box is still open!


*A quick note for our donors: Thank you for your generosity! We just want to make sure you know that PayPal charges us a fee per-transaction that is a percentage of your donation. The larger the donation amount, the smaller the percentage that PayPal takes. While sustaining donations in small amounts are greatly appreciated, a higher percentage is taken from them by PayPal as compared with larger, one-time or time-delayed amounts. Please take that into consideration when you are planning your donation.