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Inkbunny

Inkbunny needs your help! Server upgrade and hosting costs due.

Inkbunny is growing fast, and it's time to upgrade our main server, which is now over two years old. The new server will give us twice the processing capacity, more bandwidth, and twice the storage – covering our growth for several more years.

On top of the upgrade, our quarterly hosting fees are due! We can't get a new server until we pay its setup costs and the next three months of operation expenses in full – around US$1200 in total – so we're desperately in need of cash. The more we can raise, the longer we can keep going.


Inkbunny is ad-free because it is supported by you. If you can spare a few dollars and donate to help us out, we'd greatly appreciate it. Remember, donors earn a shiny sponsor badge on their account.

Spreading the word to your friends in your journal and elsewhere would help a lot, too! You can also buy a T-shirt or hoodie to show your support.


As a special thank you, anyone who donates before the end of the month can choose to have their name added to a permanent list on our Wiki, telling everyone who was responsible for bringing our latest server to life. You'll have the people's ovation and fame forever! (We'll also add the faithful fans who donated in the last four weeks, if they want.)

For those interested, the new server specs are:

HP DL380eG8 Server
12 x Intel Xeon E5-2420 64-bit 1.9GHz CPU Cores (2 chips with 6 cores each)
32GB DDR3 RAM
2TB SATA2 (4 x 1TB in RAID10) for the web server and asset storage
64GB SSD (2 x 64GB in RAID1) for the database

Compared to our old server, these new CPUs have more on-board cache, can access main memory faster, and have AES instructions that will speed up SSL encryption, to name just a few benefits.

Moving to SATA2/RAID10 gives us more storage for less, and will be faster (due to parallel reads) than the SAS RAID5 disks we have now, for the operations the server most commonly performs.

Our old server will be shut off at the end of this month. The sooner we can provision the new one, the more time we have to move Inkbunny across and test everything before that deadline hits.


Our costs include our new main server hardware setup and rent, rack space, a 100Mbit unlimited pipe to the net, our externally-hosted email+wiki, our source code repository, and ancillary items.

Due to a few generous donors last quarter, our secondary backup server is covered until next year.

Considering how big and busy our site is, and the high-spec hardware and unmetered connection, our costs are amazingly low. But we still have to find a big lump of cash every three months.

Thanks very much for your help! We couldn't keep Inkbunny going without you!

IB
Viewed: 764 times
Added: 10 years, 7 months ago
Site News Item: yes
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Jewel
10 years, 7 months ago
Do you have site stats over time? Snapshots are okay, but trends are more interesting.
GreenReaper
10 years, 7 months ago
I try to keep WikiFur updated; we've added over 30,000 users and 60,000 submissions since March.

(Bear in mind that we host far more files than submissions, since we support multi-file submissions.)
Sabreklaw
10 years, 7 months ago
Sent :)
SystFur
10 years, 7 months ago
I'm surprised that 2TB of storage really is enough.

Good luck with this.

I'm very pleased you're able to barely afford hosting a server on-site, but please consider a good, scalable VPS service in case situations seem dire!
dmfalk
10 years, 7 months ago
I can't afford to donate (already tapped out with what little I get, as it is, and I've already got a pet project eating all my money, right now, anyway :P ), but I did pimp out a journal to my 118 +watchers... :)

Good luck!

d.m.f.
dossod
10 years, 7 months ago
So who exactly owns InkBunny Ive always wonderd and do you own the physical sever equipment or do you rent it
GreenReaper
10 years, 7 months ago
The current owner is described in our terms of service. The server itself is rented, so we don't get stuck with a two year-old box down the line if we need something bigger and better.
FierceWendigo
10 years, 7 months ago
anyone single handedly funding this yet... *cracks fingers* >D
miw
miw
10 years, 7 months ago
the obscure masonic council of /g/entoomen approves of those hardware choices for this server. SSD for the database and static files looks good, since there won't be a lot of deletions. and 2TB is a reasonable amount as there will still be room for future upgrades.
IndigoNeko
10 years, 7 months ago
Indeed.
Ketsa
10 years, 7 months ago
I'm waiting on money to transfer from my Japanese bank account back to my American one so that I can get my gold status back! D: Kinda wish I hadn't turned all my money into yen a few months back.
dmfalk
10 years, 7 months ago
You can do PayPal in yen, having done transactions before- PayPal does all the exchange rates, with about the same effectiveness (and I think fees, as well) as it would to do a similar conversion with a stateside bank. :P

d.m.f.
Ketsa
10 years, 7 months ago
Last I knew you could move money from PayPal to JP Bank, but not the other way around o_O Might've changed recently, though. I guess it's also kinda funky working with an American-originating PayPal account while in Japan, so I'm being all kindsa cautious~ Definitely appreciate the info ^^
MaDrow
10 years, 7 months ago
IMO something is missing in the stats which gives a better indication of activity on IB and hosting costs, is the data transfer per month.
BunnyFoxglove
10 years, 7 months ago
They have an unmetered connection, it's part of their package. So data transfer is a bit of a moot point. If they were on a metered connection they might have to impose site restrictions or worry about limits.
MaDrow
10 years, 7 months ago
There isn't such a thing as 'unmetered', only FUP, which usually means 1 TB / month or a different pre-agreed limit. There is always a limit on data transfer.

Anyway, what is the problem asking about that, even while it is 'unmetered'? |=(:3
Shokuji
10 years, 7 months ago
Not a big fan of the HP brand, but as long as it works, I guess. I'll make a journal about this soon.
CodyFox
10 years, 7 months ago
I will definitely be submitting a donation. One thought I have had on the sponsorship thing though, I don't think diamond sponsorship should ever expire and ruby should probably last a lot longer. It might actually incentivize a few more people to try to attain those sponsorship levels and thus equal more money to the site.
Lando
10 years, 7 months ago
Awww yeah!
Catwheezle
10 years, 7 months ago
With those higher donation levels... I feel cheap and embarrassed and guilty about wasting your time with a support ticket, donating a measly $10.
But, eh, it's more than I had to donate last time, and at least it's something! :)

GreenReaper
10 years, 7 months ago
Really, every little helps. $10 is over a day of hosting. If all of the 1800 users who were on this site in the last hour donated that, we'd be good for four years!
Catwheezle
10 years, 7 months ago
I worry about wasting you guys' time with smaller donations, feeling that, below a certain amount, it no longer becomes worth it. But thinking of it as "over a day", really puts it into perspective, thank you :)

That means that even a dollar, even after your payment system has taken it's cut, is worth a good couple hours of uptime! :D

Hrm... possible donation incentive would be to show a message "the current chunk of uptime was brought to you by [name]!" somewhere, linking each donor in the order they donated, for the duration of uptime they paid for. Then everyone gets to feel special :) Maybe with an auto-PM to them ahead of time, so they can take advantage of "their hour", and the slightly increased traffic to their linked profile, in whatever way they want - some might put a stream up or put up a special pic on their profile, or something.

But that'd mean figuring out the approximate overall cost-per-minute of IB, which might be rather tricky, though. And diamond sponsors who pay for a whole server for a year or whatever, won't maybe get the appreciation they deserve :( Oh, and maybe-bigger downside: people could then calculate exactly how much the current person had paid, at finer granularity than the sponsor levels give.

So, maybe not such a great idea after all? Though it'd would certainly work as an incentive for me, but then, I don't need one, since I already am donating!
Yiffox
10 years, 7 months ago
i'll host a donation drive for inkbunny teen orgy!  https://inkbunny.net/journalview.php?id=97178
Kuto
10 years, 7 months ago
id like to donate what little i can but wheres the paypal adress?
GreenReaper
10 years, 7 months ago
Send us a ticket and we'll let you know how to donate, and what to do afterwards. And thanks!
Carrot
10 years, 7 months ago
I wanna donate <3! You guys are the best :3
JakeM
10 years, 7 months ago
Question. Once we've donated, who do we email to get the little sponsor badge? Is it just the person who emailed us with the donation details?
RollerCoasterViper59
10 years, 7 months ago
Okay so this is a wild question and I know I'm not the best person in the world... but I like this site to much to pass this up but... currently I'm a little tapped but in a few days or so I'll have some change and I'll donate to you guys I promise :3 maybe $5 at the most to help out, hope it helps. But what I really wanted to ask is as a proud member IB despite some faults I've had in the past I'd like to ask if I can guide this site to better hights... and help be a better person in the process. What I'm asking is I've been here almost 1 year now and I wanted to know if you don't mind if I become an Ink Bunny Admin. If so that's grerat, what's my position give me the details etc. If not what will it take to become an admin like you guys because I'd really like to show my appreciation to this site more :3
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