[Deathcorex]

So it really doesn't matter to me, I'm just curious, and have been for a long time.

Where exactly does all the money from donations go?

It hit me while playing on Remorse, how many completely full donor characters there are. And that isn't cheap. I mean it's $70 just for Demonic alone, then add up all the offsets, and I mean you're looking around at least $250-300 for just one character. And I know there has to be at least 100 full donors on Remorse alone, that's not even counting all the full donors on the other realms.

I'm just curious is the money pocketed, or is it actually being put to use? I know for a fact you make way more per month than is needed to keep a couple servers and a website up.

Just seems to me the people who are handing all this money over have a right to know where it's all going.

But I digress.

[Mattmeck1]

I dont think you understand how much it takes to keep everything up and running..

Lets look at what we have..

Server 1
1x - 6 Core - Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5650 @ 2.67GHz (Board has another empty socket available for quick expansion)
6x - 15K RPM (6Gbps) 300GB SAS Hard Drives (RAID 10) (Space for another 6 drives available for quick expansion)
32GB DDR3 1333 ECC RAM (Space for another 32GB of ram for quick expansion)
1x - DELL H700 RAID CARD (HUGE HDD PERFORMANCE BOOST!)

Server 2
1x - 6 Core - Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5650 @ 2.67GHz (Board has another empty socket available for quick expansion)
6x - 15K RPM (6Gbps) 300GB SAS Hard Drives (RAID 10) (Space for another 6 drives available for quick expansion)
32GB DDR3 1333 ECC RAM (Space for another 32GB of ram for quick expansion)
1x - DELL H700 RAID CARD (HUGE HDD PERFORMANCE BOOST!)

Server 3
1x - 6 Core - Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5650 @ 2.67GHz (Board has another empty socket available for quick expansion)
8x - 15K RPM (6Gbps) 300GB SAS Hard Drives (RAID 6) (Space for another 6 drives available for quick expansion)
24GB DDR3 1333 ECC RAM (24GB) (Space for another 24GB of ram for quick expansion)
1x - DELL H700 RAID CARD (HUGE HDD PERFORMANCE BOOST!)

Server 4
1x - 6 Core - Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5650 @ 2.67GHz (Board has another empty socket available for quick expansion)
6x 10K RPM (3Gbps) 300GB SAS Hard Drives (RAID 10)
3x - 8GB DDR3 1333 ECC RAM (24GB) (Space for another 24GB of ram for quick expansion)
1x - Dell Perc 6/i RAID CARD

Server 5
Not worth putting stats, its OLD.

Those our our game / development boxes. They were purchased with donations, we do not rent (its way more expensive to rent).

Now renting a rack + gigabit connection + 25 terabytes of Bandwidth a month = not cheap.

We also have..

Server box 6
1x - 6 Core - Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5650 @ 2.67GHz (Board has another empty socket available for quick expansion)
6x 10K RPM (3Gbps) 300GB SAS Hard Drives (RAID 10)
3x - 8GB DDR3 1333 ECC RAM (24GB) (Space for another 24GB of ram for quick expansion)
1x - Dell Perc 6/i RAID CARD

This runs our website and is located in a different data center. Once again it was purchased with donations.

Then there is:
Advertising ... This is not cheap, some banners are $700-$1500 a month.
Developers... Not they all dont work for free, we pay for projects that are done that give us an advantage over others.
Saving for the months when donations are down... Cypher put money aside, and some months still has to pay out of his pocket. He reimburses himself, and tries to keep for those rainy days.
Saving for upgrades... Money has to be put aside for upgrades, they are not cheap.


It costs more a month to keep Eternal up and running than my mortgage, two Harley payments, and my student loans.


You also need to realize that what you are seeing is a one time purchase, not a monthly fee. So while one month may be good another month is dead.

-- 22 Jan 2012, 18:36 --

Oh, lets also not forget the fees.

Remember paypal / moneybookers / whomever takes a cut as well. This is anywhere form 5%-40% depending on what payment source is used.

Then there is charge backs + fees, every time we loose a charge back case we get charged an additional fee.

[Cyph3r]

Oh sure, all the things mattmeck mentioned are true, and there's a lot more too.
But mainly, the biggest expense that trumps all of those is mattmeck's $300 per day Nightelf stripclub addiction.

[Mattmeck1]

Oh sure, all the things mattmeck mentioned are true, and there's a lot more too.
But mainly, the biggest expense that trumps all of those is mattmeck's $300 per day Nightelf stripclub addiction.

Hey!!

http://youtu.be/npe2pzNgYe0

Better than your addiction...

[Spikestrike]

Oh sure, all the things mattmeck mentioned are true, and there's a lot more too.
But mainly, the biggest expense that trumps all of those is mattmeck's $300 per day Nightelf stripclub addiction.

OUCH!! Matt just got owned

[PandaPals03]

At least its not a Belf addiction........ Then i would be worried!

[Kabekiz]

"bargain basement" DDoS protection for 1 IP and 5mb/s is around $300 a month.

We have about 8 used IP addresses, and each runs a steady 40mb/s minimum and little more then triple that at our peak (PER BOX).

Then you have bandwidth and colocation in a place that doesn't roll over everytime it gets a letter from some backwoods lawyer and can provide 1gb/s network speeds to each of our boxes.

It gets rather expensive.

[Cyph3r]

"bargain basement" DDoS protection for 1 IP and 5mb/s is around $300 a month.

We have about 8 used IP addresses, and each runs a steady 40mb/s minimum and little more then triple that at our peak (PER BOX).

Then you have bandwidth and colocation in a place that doesn't roll over everytime it gets a letter from some backwoods lawyer and can provide 1gb/s network speeds to each of our boxes.

It gets rather expensive.

I wish ours was only $300. Just the starter package when we needed 1 IP was $1500/m. Now we have protection for 8 IP's. Granted, this place is one of the best. Many of the cheap places I researched would have no chance at protecting us on many of the attacks we've had. When I told them about our 5Gbps attack in January 2011, they laughed saying their protection was rated to handle only 200 Mbps... That's not even an attack, that's our normal traffic, lol.

[Deathcorex]

Thank you for clearing everything up for me.