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The OrthodoxChristianity.net Fund Drive
- Thread starter IXOYE
- Start date
We will be working on adding a donation function back to the forum soon. Everyone's support is greatly appreciated!
- Joined
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- www.anastasioshudson.com
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
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
I set up a biweekly donation of $5. It’s not much, but I hope it helps.
I just plunked in a couple of bucks.
- Joined
- Oct 3, 2002
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- 10,572
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- www.anastasioshudson.com
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
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
- Joined
- Oct 3, 2002
- Messages
- 10,572
- Reaction score
- 26
- Points
- 48
- Location
- Reston, VA
- Website
- www.anastasioshudson.com
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.
"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.
- Joined
- Oct 3, 2002
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- 10,572
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- Location
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- www.anastasioshudson.com
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
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
- Joined
- Oct 3, 2002
- Messages
- 10,572
- Reaction score
- 26
- Points
- 48
- Location
- Reston, VA
- Website
- www.anastasioshudson.com
Update: 1/4 of the way there. Thanks to the 2 donors who have stepped up.
- Joined
- Oct 3, 2002
- Messages
- 10,572
- Reaction score
- 26
- Points
- 48
- Location
- Reston, VA
- Website
- www.anastasioshudson.com
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
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
Member
Auction off rights to get a delete on one's own stupidest post.