The OrthodoxChristianity.net Fund Drive

[IXOYE]

Donations are welcome

from our members

or future members.

Thank you very much!​

 

[IXOYE]

A reminder to our members and friends

that OrthodoxChristianity.net can

use your donations.

Thank you to all that have donated.​

 

[IXOYE]

Donations to the site

of any size

are appreciated.

Thank you!​

 

[IXOYE]

Your donations are appreciated.

Thank you!​

 

[IXOYE]

If you are able to make a small contribution,

it is welcome.

Thank you!​

 

[noahzarc1]

We are about to switch over to the new software, and all this is quite expensive, so donations are indeed appreciated.  By the way, if anyone has donated but this is not reflected in your status, feel free to let me know.

sent you PM.

 

[IXOYE]

Donations welcome of any size

if you able at this difficult time.

Thank you very much!​

 

[IXOYE]

Your donations

are appreciated

if you are able.

Thank you!​

 

[IXOYE]

Donations of any

amount are appreciated.

Thank you!​

 

[IXOYE]

Perhaps Anastasios will comment, but I wanted to send out the monthly reminder:

Donations are always gratefully accepted.

Thank you!​

 

[Fr. George]

Perhaps Anastasios will comment, but I wanted to send out the monthly reminder:

Donations are always gratefully accepted.

Thank you!​

We will be working on adding a donation function back to the forum soon. Everyone's support is greatly appreciated!

 

[IXOYE]

Donations are appreciated to the site.

We have a new upgrade - a Paypal Button

has been added by the site's founder.

Thank you!​

 

[Anastasios]

Friends,

Thanks so much to the three people who donated since I added the button. Every bit helps!

Between taking down the old version of the site and now (about 2.5 months), we didn't have a donate button. A kind person donated enough to keep us covered during that time.

The old site had a PayPal plugin which allowed us to show who donated (if they wished to be shown) and how much we had received against our monthly operating costs. I am looking to see if this new software has something similar.

Until then, please rest assured that we are not banking tons of money in donations which I in turn would pocket. LOL. Many times, I and Fr. George have covered costs of the site out of pocket during critical points of its 18 year history (gosh...18 years!) But thankfully, most of the time, you all have come through for us. Only a few times have we had a surplus, and when that happened, we used it to upgrade the infrastructure. So donate away, and rest assured that your donation help us directly, and is being used for the site only. No one is profiting off your donations

Thank you for your support and trust in us as we work to make the donation system more transparent.

Also, I can receive donations via check. Send me a private message and I will give you my home address.

I am also now on Venmo. I don't particularly like Venmo, as I think social sharing of payments is odd (glad it can be made private!), but people are there, so I am, too (helps that I have a 22 year-old stepdaughter). So if you want to Venmo me, it's @Anastasios-Hudson

Yours in Christ,
Anastasios
Founder of OrthodoxChristianity.net

 

[seeker_has_awakened]

I set up a biweekly donation of $5. It’s not much, but I hope it helps.

 

[biro]

I just plunked in a couple of bucks.

 

[IXOYE]

Our monthly reminder


to anyone interested in


donating to OrthodoxChristianity.net.


Thank you for your contributions!​

 

[IXOYE]

Thank you to all our contributors!

This website is grateful for your donation.​

 

[IXOYE]

Your donations are appreciated.

Thank you for your help.​

 

[Anastasios]

Friends,

As always, thanks for the donations received. They've been a bit less than previously, but still enough to cover our minimum costs due to a few "larger than expected" donations.

OCnet is "owned" by me, Anastasios Hudson, personally, and all donations go to my PayPal account (or if you write a check, to me personally, but I then use it for the site). I've never asked for more money than required, and I've only "paid myself" out of donations one time for tech work performed--work we would have had to pay someone else to do, and I was out of money and needed it to pay bills; thank God, I have not been in that situation ever since). Prior to that, I often covered the cost for the site myself out of pocket when donations didn't suffice, and performed tech work pro bono.

If we ever were to get any really "big" donation, I'd be happy to use it to expand the site beyond just a forum to make it more of a research center; but I've never had any serious interest (occasional fleeting interest, but no solid commitments). Anyone interested in financing the site in a major way to help us grow to that point is welcome to contact myself and Fr. George, who administers the site moderation-wise (while I keep it running technically).

But to those of you who faithfully donate $1, $5, $10, $25 regularly, and those of you who occasionally and exceptionally donate $50 or $100, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Anastasios Hudson
Webdespota and Founder of OCnet
Reston, Virginia, USA

 

[Anastasios]

To those of you reading the above post: why not donate $1? Don't think it will make a difference? It will! Let me paraphrase one of those cliches from every infomercial, web ad, and Facebook solicitation:

"If everyone reading this post were to donate just one dollar, we would have our expenses covered for ten years, and would be able to do literal miracles and bring about world peace!!"

Well, maybe not all that, but certainly we could take this site to the next level!

A.

 

[IXOYE]

Your support is appreciated!

Thank you to our donors!​

 

[IXOYE]

Donations are appreciated.

Thank you to all!​

 

[Anastasios]

Thanks, as always, @IXOYE for your faithful reminders to the community.

All,

Monthly server costs are currently $60/month. For full disclosure, we host via OVH. So far in the past year, all hosting costs have been covered by regular donations; the new software and additional add-ons were covered by a combination of special donations. I have not had to dip into my own pocket in the past year: thank you all for making that possible (although I would not hesitate to do so, in order to keep the site running, if I had to).

Here are my latest thoughts. Currently, I manually take backups of our site every week or two via SSH and MySQL commands, followed by gziping the output, and then downloading manually via SFTP. We have a VMware setup, and as such, can take snapshots, but I am still learning the system, and at the same time, I don't want to "clog up" the system and run out of disk space, since cloud-based virtual storage is expensive. But there is always a risk that I won't take a proper backup, or will forget to do it regularly and risk data loss were there to be an outage.

Currently, I save our backups to my personal NAS device (a Synology NAS Diskstation 718+, if anyone is curious). I have 2 4TB NAS-specific pro drives in there, and I also take a copy of that onto an external drive, which I store off-site, in the event of a fire or flood in my home.

I am almost out of space. I just bought a second NAS device (a Synology DS220), but I don't have redundant disks.

The ask is that someone (or a group) please sponsor us by donating two additional NAS-specific hard drives. 8 TB would be ideal to do full VMware snapshots with regularity, while 4 TB would be a good "budget-level" donation to keep us afloat for the next 2 years or so.

Please send me a PM to discuss details if you wish to better understand the ask. I will update this post once we receive a sponsor, so that you are assured that I am not taking advantage of anyone's generosity. You all know I wouldn't do that, but nonetheless, I like to be explicitly upfront and transparent.

We can recognize your donation publicly, or offer prayers on your behalf, or do some other kind of "in-kind" charitable act, or you can remain completely anonymous.

Thank you all.

Anastasios

TL;dr: please donate 2 NAS hard disks to help maintain OCnet backups.

Examples:

8 TB WD Drive: https://amzn.to/3wAiM5F
8 TB Seagate Drive: https://amzn.to/3dM42rx
4 TB WD Drive: https://amzn.to/3uwIqpX
4 TB Seagate Drive: https://amzn.to/3t3Sc2K

 

[Anastasios]

Update: 1/4 of the way there. Thanks to the 2 donors who have stepped up.

 

[Anastasios]

Update:

Amazon had 10 TB drives on sale, so I went with that instead of the 8 TB drives and forked over $600 of my own cash to cover it in the hopes of receiving donations to cover at least most of it. But then Amazon screwed up one of the orders, so I ended up getting one of the 10 TB drives for free! wow lol. I would never ask the community to donate money in excess of the need, so:

Total request for this has decreased from $600 to $300.

We've received $150 so far, so we're at 50% of goal.

Thanks,
Anastasios

 

[Stinky]

Update:

Amazon had 10 TB drives on sale, so I went with that instead of the 8 TB drives and forked over $600 of my own cash to cover it in the hopes of receiving donations to cover at least most of it. But then Amazon screwed up one of the orders, so I ended up getting one of the 10 TB drives for free! wow lol. I would never ask the community to donate money in excess of the need, so:

Total request for this has decreased from $600 to $300.

We've received $150 so far, so we're at 50% of goal.

Thanks,
Anastasios

Auction off rights to get a delete on one's own stupidest post.

 

[IXOYE]

Donations are always appreciated.

Thank you!​

 

[IXOYE]

A monthly reminder

for contributions,

if you can.

Thank you to all our donors!​

 

[Avdima]

Just donated a few dollars.

 

[IXOYE]

A Monthly Reminder

That OrthodoxChristianity.net

Can Use Your Donation.

Thank you.​

 

[IXOYE]

Donations to the website are appreciated.

Thank you very much!​

 

[Anastasios]

Thank you, as always @IXOYE for your kind reminders, and thanks to everyone who donates!

 

[IXOYE]

Your support is appreciated.

Thank you!​

 

[Anastasios]

Friends,

Thanks as always for your donations. Just want to give the occasional update, so you know where donations go.

The server cost is $60/month. 1/3 of this is going to other projects I have, so $40/month is for OCnet purposes.

I just extended the forum software license (we went to a paid software package last year, as it offers superior support and more updates); the original license was about $160, and yearly renewal is $55 at this point.

We also had a donation drive about 6 months ago where I asked for something like $300 to buy an extra hard drive for our backup purposes. That's been very helpful, and we have lots of backups of the forum in the advent of a technical glitch or hackers.

Right now, there is no need to issue an "urgent appeal"; God has granted us solvency. That being said, please do continue to donate, as we never know when we might hit a dry spell. I generally cover the cost when there is a shortage, but a few times I have not been able to due to my family situation. Therefore, I like to keep the donations rolling in, but not make too many appeals as we don't need too much of a surplus: in other words, saving for a rainy day, but not trying to milk the system, either.

Thanks for all you do, my brothers and sisters in Christ.

Anastasios
Founder & Webdespota of OCnet

 

[IXOYE]

A monthly reminder

if you would like to

make a contribution.

Thank you.​

 

[IXOYE]

A monthly reminder if you would like to make a donation to the website.

Thank you.​

 

[IXOYE]

Any donation to the forum is appreciated.

Thank you.​

 

[Anastasios]

Thank you as always to those who donate, and especially to you @IXOYE for always keeping up with the reminders.

 

[IXOYE]

Your contributions are gratefully welcomed.

Thank you very much!​