November 2021 Donations & Finances

[Cipher]

Hello everyone!

 

As always with these posts, I’d like to drop a quick reminder that there are more ways to support Homecoming than just through donations. For a general overview of the different ways you can help Homecoming, check out this thread.

 

We’re always in need of more people to help test upcoming updates on our public beta server; the bug reports and feedback that we receive from testers helps us immensely. For more information on how to get started on the beta server, check out our Read This to Get Started thread and the rest of the Beta Forums.

 

---

Last Month: October 2021

 

Last month we accepted $5,856.15 in donations, $4.43 over our target for the month. As always, all remaining funds will be put towards our operating expenses for the upcoming month.

 

We went forward with two renewals (DocuSign & Namecheap) that were originally planned for November this month. The invoice totals for these renewals is included below for clarity when reviewing the PayPal screencap below, but will be included in November’s donation target still as they were not covered by the donation target for October.

 

Here is the breakdown of what October’s funds went towards:

• $4,094.46 for our hardware infrastructure from OVH
  • + $1,196.00 in setup fees for the two new SCALE-3 servers
  • + $1,027.98 for the first month of service on the two new SCALE-3 servers
    • This was higher than anticipated due to a billing change, and the difference will be included in November’s donation target for clarity
• $300.00 to renew our annual DocuSign subscription
  • Early renewal, included in November’s target
• $137.76 for two domain renewals from Namecheap
  • Early renewal, included in November’s target
• $121.45 for our Google G-Suite services
• $25.00 for our Air instance from Paperspace
• $19.24 for the AWS EC2 instance serving our email
• $10.00 for our Atlassian Jira (Cloud) service
• $9.73 for security / administration software

 

 

---

This Month: November 2021

 

We received both of the additional SCALE-3 servers that we ordered this month as part of our ongoing mapserver host hardware changes. Unfortunately, though, delivery was late in the month and they were delivered with troublesome network adapters. As such, we were unable to migrate to them in time to cancel the older ADVANCE-5 servers, which we will be billed for again in November.

 

Additionally, OVH charged us for a full month of service on these new servers up-front rather than billing pro-rata as they have in the past, leaving a difference of $641.55 to recover in November.

 

The only other changes this month are that we have cancelled our Atlassian Jira account that was billing us $10/mo as we were not utilizing it, and we have identified the cause of the recent price increase on our Amazon AWS account and have made changes to reduce our AWS costs going forward.

 

All of that said, the donation target for November 2021 is $5,730.55. Here is a breakdown of how the funds are allocated:

• $4,094.46 for our hardware infrastructure from OVH
  • + $641.55 to cover the remaining cost of the first month of service on the new SCALE-3 servers
• $300.00 for our annual DocuSign renewal
• $137.76 for two one-year domain renewals
• $121.57 for our Google G-Suite services
• $25.00 for our Air instance from Paperspace
• $9.73 for security / administration software
• $8.56 for the AWS EC2 instance serving our email

 

---

 

Our donation system will be open as of the time of this post with a donation target of $5,730.55 and will automatically close once that target is met.

 

As always, thank you for all of the support, and have a Happy Halloween! 👻

 

- The Homecoming Team

 

[Abraxus]

...and DONE!  Another month of doing my part to keep playing the only game I want to play!

[Matsiyan]

Happily contributed. Thank you!

[Coyotedancer]

Hey, I managed to get in in time this month... Nibbles for the server-gerbils sent.

[Glacier Peak]

Added to the efforts!

[Asacledhae]

Gotcha as usual!

[Ranger4834]

Happy to donate! Thanks for all you do!

[RogerWilco]

Thank you for keeping the lights on!

[Peacemoon]

Not playing at the moment but happy to donate to one of my favourite MMOs! Thanks again for all you do! 🤩

[Ironblade]

It's going slow this month.  Still open.  Which has a good aspect - I was able to donate today.  It often closes before I realize it's donation day.

[GraspingVileTerror]

Currently at 83.1% roughly seven hours after launch.

[Heraclea]

Got in before the buzzer this time.

 

[biostem]

Was able to donate.  Thank you Homecoming team!

[Anker Steadfast]

10 bucks floating your way. 😀

[Glacier Peak]

3 hours ago, GraspingVileTerror said:

Currently at 83.1% roughly seven hours after launch.

Eh holiday weekend I think that's reasonable

[GraspingVileTerror]

Hallowe'en is a holiday somewhere in the world?  Well, dang.  I might actually have a reason to move . . . 

[Peacemoon]

191 donations have been made. That’s a great effort by the community. I am always so impressed by this ☺️

[Asacledhae]

We have an awesome community here, i wouldn't expect any less..

Usually the donation window closes within a few hours.. I blame Halloween for taking this long this time. 😋

[YourOlPalVoodoo]

Finally able to get here in time to donate! ^_^ Thank you all for this.

[SuggestorK]

Also done, and were very close to finish, like less then 200$ left ^^

Edited October 31, 2021 by SuggestorK

[Anker Steadfast]

Now at 99.2% .. .I think it's safe to say, that we will reach the goal within the donation window. 😄

[Replacement]

On 10/30/2021 at 1:04 PM, Cipher said:

We received both of the additional SCALE-3 servers that we ordered this month as part of our ongoing mapserver host hardware changes. Unfortunately, though, delivery was late in the month and they were delivered with troublesome network adapters. As such, we were unable to migrate to them in time to cancel the older ADVANCE-5 servers, which we will be billed for again in November.

 

Additionally, OVH charged us for a full month of service on these new servers up-front rather than billing pro-rata as they have in the past, leaving a difference of $641.55 to recover in November.

Really frustrating to feel like you're being charged extra for their problems. I hope some of this gets credited in future months.

 

Do you or @Telephone have a NON-BINDING, GUESSTIMATE on what the next few months are going to look like bill-wise? Surely we've gotta be out of the weeds on these  SCALE-3 transition costs by now...

 

[Telephone]

9 hours ago, Replacement said:

Really frustrating to feel like you're being charged extra for their problems. I hope some of this gets credited in future months.

 

Do you or @Telephone have a NON-BINDING, GUESSTIMATE on what the next few months are going to look like bill-wise? Surely we've gotta be out of the weeds on these  SCALE-3 transition costs by now...

 

 

If all goes well we'll be dropping our remaining four NA Advance-5 servers at the end of November. These cost us approximately $1300 for the November bill. The annoyance here was that we based our order date partly off OVH's delivery estimate (20-30 days) and while OVH has delivered servers late before, this is the first time we've received them early. If we had received the SCALE-3s in early to mid November as we expected, we would have had sufficient time to set them up and cancel the Advance-5s.

 

The billing on the SCALE-3s is also thankfully not as bad as it seems - even though we were billed the full first month in advance, we will receive a prorated bill in the future to make the billing cycle match (note: this may cost us a small amount extra temporarily; I expect that in late November OVH will bill the SCALE-3s through either the beginning or end of December). So our SCALE-3s are actually paid up through late November, and long-term we are not paying extra for them.

 

We've also gotten the network issue fixed and are proceeding with qualification and installation on them. I don't know if OVH will issue a credit, but we'll follow up on the ticket and see if we can get something from them.

 

As far as non-binding estimates, please refer to my other post:

 

The savings are so great from changing to the SCALE-3s that we'll still see our monthly costs go down; it will just take a little bit longer before they pay us back. We've already started getting some savings as we have already replaced two of our previous Advance-5s with the first SCALE-3 (going from six to the current four).

[Blackwell]

Some other time maybe I'll have time to contribute within the donation window 🙂

[RogerWilco]

17 hours ago, Replacement said:

Really frustrating to feel like you're being charged extra for their problems. I hope some of this gets credited in future months.

 

Do you or @Telephone have a NON-BINDING, GUESSTIMATE on what the next few months are going to look like bill-wise? Surely we've gotta be out of the weeds on these  SCALE-3 transition costs by now...

 

In my experience these things happen with such hardware. I haven't received a data processing cluster yet, where there wasn't some issue before we could fully use it. ( we once had to send 100 motherboards back to Taiwan for them to actually replace a component.). And it doesn't really matter with supplier: HP, Dell, Super Micro, IBM, Lenovo, etc. We once had to write our own network card driver to get the full performance of the hardware.

It's nice if a service like OHV ends up with the costs for such things, but that's in the fine print of the contract.

 

And delivery times are all over the place right now.

 

Thanks for keeping the City running, we had a blast last weekend doing the Halloween stuff.