Pay Time and Update

Hi everyone,

One-Time Payment

As mentioned in the previous post, today we'll collect the yearly payment. This post is a creation and will charge you the amount you pledged. It will be the only paid post this year. This way we can manage to only pay you once.

Discord Tags

We want to give you a little bit of recognition for supporting Rekking Crew. I am working with Rocket to setup a discord role with a colour to show that you are a supporter. Our main issue is that with the Alliance Auth bot managing all roles on the server, we cannot add the Patreon discord integration, as Alliance Auth will just nuke whatever the Patreon Bot wants to do. As a workaround we will manually manage the role via Alliance Auth and not use the discord integration of Patreon.

YOUR ACTION NEEDED: If you want to have a "supporter" role on discord, please message me your in game character name that is registered on Alliance Auth via Patreon. I'll manually add you to the role.

Money Spent

An overview of our current cost:

- Server: ~$35 / month: We are running an Azure B2 instance with 2 virtual CPUs and 4 GB of ram at a cost of $0.0416 per hour ($30/month).  In addition we are using backup storage to store a daily snapshot. This storage costs us about $5-10 per month. The server runs Alliance Auth, Mumble, Alliance Auth Bots, Pathfinder and necessary databases. See attached picture for reference over the last 7 days. This is billed to me.

- Domain: The domain rekkingcrew.org costs us $15.99 per year. This is billed to Tarsas Phage and I'll reimburse him. See attached picture.

The current total cost yearly is $436. We have a pledge of $603. 8% goes to Patreon. Leaving us $118 unspent. I'll describe in the next section what we are planning.

Upcoming

We have a few things in mind at the moment that we want to do:

- Cloud Monitoring: I want to get a service running that monitors our systems and alerts me if servers are down. I am currently looking at Grafana Cloud and PagerDuty, but haven't really selected one yet. Both services are free of charge in the instances we will use them.

- Server Upgrade / Reserved: With funding secured, we will look at the usage pattern of the server and decide if we upgrade within the next 30 days. In addition are changing to a year-long reserved instance that will significantly reduce cost (current server will be at ~$17.5 / month on a year-long payment instead of pay-as-you-go).

- Discord: We currently have 2 boosts out of 15 needed for the next level. 13 additional boosts would cost $ 65 per year. Initially i want to spent money on Discord, but I feel it's
too expensive to get the next tier and the value gained is questionable.

- Backup/Financial Responsibility: Most of the remaining money will be held back for now in case we need to upgrade our servers, spent more money on storage, etc. If it is clear that we will spent way less than anticipated by the end of the year, I will make a Patreon vote to have you all decide if and how we want to spent the money, or if we just roll it over to next years costs.

Nerd Stuff

For those of you who are interested in some more specifics of the server setup. We currently run the server on FreeBSD 12.2, with Alliance Auth running on Python 3.7 with MariaDB backing. Mumble also uses MariaDB as backing. Pathfinder also uses MariaDB but runs on PHP 7.4. Everything is behind an nginx reverse proxy. We do not containerize but run everything on bare metal. The VM is backuped daily, in addition dumps are pulled to the PHEW servers for redundancy

Feedback

You have suggestions for how to improve the Patreon interaction or have concerns on how the money is spent. Please feel free to message me. I want to make this work in the best possible way.

Again a big big thank you. When we came up with the idea to use Patreon to support our cost, we weren't sure if it's gonna work out. I should known better. The EVE Community always come together and helps out. So a big thank you with helping here.

Danilaw