Homecoming Server Update (May 7th): Donations

Hey folks,

We have some major news that many of you have been curious about. We’ve been asked time and time again if you’re able to financially contribute to the Homecoming team, and so far the answer has been ‘not yet’ because we wanted to ensure we weren’t putting the server in any unnecessary risk.

Today that changes. We’re happy to say that we’ve now set up as an LLC (the first step towards becoming a non-profit) and are in a position to be able to take donations in order to keep the servers online.

Going forwards, our plan is to move to a less expensive, long-term hosting solution with OVH. The key reason this solution is less expensive is because it is significantly less flexible, but now that we’ve experimented with what our hardware requirements are and have the server load under control, that is no longer an issue.

This initial donation drive will be to cover some one-off costs as well as the first month of hosting at OVH. Once those costs are covered we will close off donations until next month. We’ll continue with this pattern until a longer-term solution is decided upon - likely in the form of a Patreon.

For full transparency: The money is being handled by a new legal entity, Homecoming Servers LLC (registered in Delaware, file number 7407345), which was set up today. We are currently in the process of transferring all Homecoming-related assets into this new entity.

Our ongoing costs will be roughly as follows:

• Auth Server
  
  • 1x A1 @ $102.99

   

  [*]Shard Database Servers

  • 5x A1 @ $102.99 each, $514.95 total

   

  [*]Central Database

  • 1x A3 @ 137.99

   

  [*]Mapservers

  • 6x A5 @ $354.99 each, $2129.94 total

   

  [*]Services Box

  • 1x A1 @ $102.99

For a total of: $2,988.86 per month before factoring software licenses. Please head on over to this page for more information on OVH’s pricing.

In addition, the one-off costs for this month also include:

• Around $1200 to pay off the remaining bill to Digital Ocean (here’s the bill for May so far), up until this point we’ve paid around $1370 ourselves
  
• Around $500 to cover the remaining time we will be spending on Digital Ocean
  
• $375 filing costs for setting up Homecoming Servers LLC
  
• A $1250 contingency fund to cover any other unexpected costs or to spin up additional hardware if needed

Which is an additional $3225, for a total of $6313.86.

Lastly, a few quick points:

• There is absolutely no in-game benefit to donating, and there never will be - the one exception may be that donors get queue priority and/or some kind of forum title, but that is undetermined at this point (and definitely will not be happening for a while - we just want to be fully transparent about our intentions)
  
• Homecoming Servers LLC is not currently a non-profit as it’s a multi-month process to set one up, but the eventual goal is to convert it into one (as previously mentioned, the entity was set up today)
  
• The primary reason for setting up an LLC is to give us tax protection - if the donations were funneled through an individual, they would be classed as income and as such would be taxable
  
• We plan to close donations as soon as the $6613.86 goal is met, and the same process will be repeated for future months until a more permanent solution is worked out (see above)
  
• If we receive any money over the goal before we shut donations off, it will be put in reserves for use the next month
  
• We will post full receipts of all expenditure at the end of each month

If you wish to contribute, please go on over to our new donation page (apologies, it isn’t very pretty yet). We will update this post once the donation goal for the month has been met. The donation target has been met, thank you!

Thank you in advance for your support. And as always: Go. Hunt. Kill Skuls.

- The Homecoming Team