Wasn't sure where to post this so I hope this is the right place. I have seen the urgent situation with this site's tech needs and the money required to keep it going. I would like to donate when I can but I do have a question I hope the admin or others can answer....isn't it possible to run the site on a 3rd party host for way less money per month? It looks like Susan runs her own web server and is having to do all the work. This seems like an enormous burden for one person to deal with!  Is there a reason why this site is better off being run solo? I only ask because I worry what might happen if one month she can't raise enough money. What are the drawbacks of trying to run susans.org on a 3rd party web host? 

Between the software mix the web site runs on, the required bandwidth and the amount of storage required the site would cost far more on a 3rd party server than it does to run it the way it's currently run. For a long time Susan kept the site running out of her own pocket but fortunes changed and she is no longer able to do so. Over the last year and a half she has had to resort to donations to keep the site operational and has other plans in the works but they are in the future. For now she has to depend on the generosity of the user to keep the site available to those who need it.

A different site had a similar issue years ago - it went from owner funded to member funded.  It took a while but unfortunately fizzled out as the monthly target was constantly missed.

It may get to a stage here where one too many shortfalls, server downs, real life issues cause a choice between website and personal life. And the former will lose.   I do think that's a very real possibility here.

Quote from: Atom on July 26, 2016, 07:54:28 AM
A different site had a similar issue years ago - it went from owner funded to member funded.  It took a while but unfortunately fizzled out as the monthly target was constantly missed.

It may get to a stage here where one too many shortfalls, server downs, real life issues cause a choice between website and personal life. And the former will lose.   I do think that's a very real possibility here.

I can assure you that will not happen but we do need as much help as we can get.

Could we crowdfund it? Like through kickstarter?


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I doubt that crowd funding would be of any permanent use.

Donating should work well.

As we know, it is a very rare day that we have less than 400 people on the site. Look at that over a month. If 400 people gave $5 by PayPal we are all clear and done. A cup of coffee per month.

We know some cannot afford that, and that is fine. I hope one day we can reach out to our members who can't support us, so we can support them. That is one of my goals.

Of course for some this site seems small, particularly if you are closeted and afraid, looking in on your device hidden away. But we are enormous. We have about 23,000 members. Susan is in the USA in Tennessee, I'm in Adelaide in South Australia, we have staff around the world, we have members all around the world.

Giving little bit of support on a regular basis is all we need.

I think there is a way to slave multiple computers together across the internet in order to use the processing power and storage from them to run the website. I think it might be called distributed computing. Forum members could use older computers from around the house, even if they are years old. As long as the software can run on them it should work. That way if one computer goes down there is a redundancy across the network. It would also help with costs as they are now distributed across multiple forum members computers. In fact, the costs might be close to none except for the electricity of course for other forum members. But im not sure what the costs would be to get a network like that running but it might be cheaper that way. I think it could be a very viable solution.

This is a list of projects that use distributed computing.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwi6tq22gpLOAhXB5oMKHWUtAR4QFggrMAI&url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FList_of_distributed_computing_projects&usg=AFQjCNG_-wJUr1Q_Tgz_r0tNqilsnx8SzQ&sig2=l1I8OqwRlbtTXqBwn7JdZQ

I have been running a distributive computing program starting in 2001 and the way it works is the central server dishes out the work to the computers and when the work is done, the results are returned to the central server. It works great when you have massive computation that need to be done but in this case, we need a central data base controlled by a single computer. There is no way around a central server unless you don't care about security. In addition, my home system is powerful enough to replace Susan's system but I lack the internet connection to support the volume of traffic that the site sees. I suspect few if any users have a connection that could support more than a small fraction of what Susan's can handle. Without that, the site would slow to a crawl.

Susan has enough professional knowledge to know what the hardware requirements to do the job however funding it is the most difficult problem she faces.

The database can be sharded, and placed across many machines, but that is by the by. The compute system could be clustered using BeeOND, again an interesting option, if the master was running BeeGFS, neither are simple, or straightforward.

The environment is complex as its demands are high availability, higher transaction throughput, and high network capability, with the ease/ability to back up and restore. All of this on a custom software platform - it's not as simple as it seems, and Susan has done a brilliant job at making it do all of this on a (very) limited budget.

Sno

Now, why do I get the feeling we have some seriously heavy IT hitters hanging out here? 

(Retired SW Eng. from a fruity business on the US Left Coast...)

Sno's post made me somewhat laugh... Right the second Susan's ask for help came in, I was staring at a screen telling me that 6 out of 180 index shards are unavailable... Ended up being another sleepless night.

Still want to thank Susan and the other admins for all the hard work to keep the site running - especially considering the budget. I hope the community can come together and keep this site going.