Hi everyone, I was wondering if the community has any suggestions on how we can get more donations/funding. Last year UnrealIRCd received 40 EUR in donations, which was the lowest figure ever.
Current situation and costs
I already spend hundreds of hours per year and do about 80%-90% of the UnrealIRCd coding. In other areas it is much more a community effort with a lot more people doing support, documentation, testing. I myself am mostly OK with doing all the coding work for free, been doing that for 20 years now. What I am less happy about is that I am also the one paying all the (hosting) costs at the moment.
The hosting costs are around 1500 EUR per year for all websites. However, recently the Central Blocklist was launched to defend against large scale IRC-wide floods. Although only a couple of dozens of networks use it, is seems a success as such activity has been ceased since we launched it. However, this adds another extra 1500 EUR in hosting costs per year. Now, those latter costs could probably be reduced at the cost of giving up redundancy, but even then the overall hosting costs are likely to stay at 2000-2500 EUR per year in total. I'm not sure if there is much that can be done about that. We host at major providers such as Amazon and Microsoft Azure. I have moved hosting in the past to other providers and each time they nullrouted or closed our account. Maybe this comes to a surprise to others but UnrealIRCd is a DDoS victim for decades already, we just don't talk about it openly because we don't want to give those guys any attention, but it is something we have to deal with. Similarly, we have used donated machines in the past, but they had similar attacks or had other trouble like the hosting being cut off without any prior warning. Recently we got CloudFlare protection, including a free upgrade to the Pro variant, which is great, but still... It is good to keep the infra at major providers to keep things well protected and flexible. Also, some infra is directly exposed such as the IRC servers. So, long story short, I think we are kinda stuck with such hosting costs and we would need those funded.
Again, I think the present situation is not really healthy where I have to personally pay the couple of thousands a year for hosting. It is not something that requires an immediate fix next week, but also not something that should keep going on for many months or another year, which is why I hope to get this conversation started.
How can we get more funding?
I have looked at starting a foundation, like becoming an official non-profit organization, but.. that involves a lot of paperwork and costs, not just one off but also yearly. Every time I look at this it's not really worth the hassle. It comes with some benefits, but we don't really have an income stream to compensate (quite the opposite in fact), it seems a lot of trouble for.. not much... and mostly a waste / overhead.
At the moment we only have a PayPal button at https://www.unrealircd.org/index/donations. We could of course, increase visibility of that to more places, but.... is PayPal really a good platform? It seems mostly tailored to one-off donations, people donate 10 EUR and then move on, which is nice but it doesn't really help much in the big scheme of things. I'm personally not good at PR or asking for money. I know InspIRCd was funded in the past by IRC.com and more recently by IRCCloud, but we don't have any such deals.
Should we diversify to other areas / donation platforms, and if so, which? Should we do more with monthly sponsorships, like Patreon? It would be nice to have monthly sponsors, even if it is only 5 EUR or 10 EUR per month.. at least that covers costs in a more long-term fashion. But then, is there something we can offer the people sponsoring us in return? And should we diversify to lots of platforms or should we only pick a couple and concentrate on those? Ideas are welcome on all these things and things I fail to mention.
There are more than thousand networks running UnrealIRCd. I hope we can find some way to get at least the costs covered.
Current situation and costs
I already spend hundreds of hours per year and do about 80%-90% of the UnrealIRCd coding. In other areas it is much more a community effort with a lot more people doing support, documentation, testing. I myself am mostly OK with doing all the coding work for free, been doing that for 20 years now. What I am less happy about is that I am also the one paying all the (hosting) costs at the moment.
The hosting costs are around 1500 EUR per year for all websites. However, recently the Central Blocklist was launched to defend against large scale IRC-wide floods. Although only a couple of dozens of networks use it, is seems a success as such activity has been ceased since we launched it. However, this adds another extra 1500 EUR in hosting costs per year. Now, those latter costs could probably be reduced at the cost of giving up redundancy, but even then the overall hosting costs are likely to stay at 2000-2500 EUR per year in total. I'm not sure if there is much that can be done about that. We host at major providers such as Amazon and Microsoft Azure. I have moved hosting in the past to other providers and each time they nullrouted or closed our account. Maybe this comes to a surprise to others but UnrealIRCd is a DDoS victim for decades already, we just don't talk about it openly because we don't want to give those guys any attention, but it is something we have to deal with. Similarly, we have used donated machines in the past, but they had similar attacks or had other trouble like the hosting being cut off without any prior warning. Recently we got CloudFlare protection, including a free upgrade to the Pro variant, which is great, but still... It is good to keep the infra at major providers to keep things well protected and flexible. Also, some infra is directly exposed such as the IRC servers. So, long story short, I think we are kinda stuck with such hosting costs and we would need those funded.
Again, I think the present situation is not really healthy where I have to personally pay the couple of thousands a year for hosting. It is not something that requires an immediate fix next week, but also not something that should keep going on for many months or another year, which is why I hope to get this conversation started.
How can we get more funding?
I have looked at starting a foundation, like becoming an official non-profit organization, but.. that involves a lot of paperwork and costs, not just one off but also yearly. Every time I look at this it's not really worth the hassle. It comes with some benefits, but we don't really have an income stream to compensate (quite the opposite in fact), it seems a lot of trouble for.. not much... and mostly a waste / overhead.
At the moment we only have a PayPal button at https://www.unrealircd.org/index/donations. We could of course, increase visibility of that to more places, but.... is PayPal really a good platform? It seems mostly tailored to one-off donations, people donate 10 EUR and then move on, which is nice but it doesn't really help much in the big scheme of things. I'm personally not good at PR or asking for money. I know InspIRCd was funded in the past by IRC.com and more recently by IRCCloud, but we don't have any such deals.
Should we diversify to other areas / donation platforms, and if so, which? Should we do more with monthly sponsorships, like Patreon? It would be nice to have monthly sponsors, even if it is only 5 EUR or 10 EUR per month.. at least that covers costs in a more long-term fashion. But then, is there something we can offer the people sponsoring us in return? And should we diversify to lots of platforms or should we only pick a couple and concentrate on those? Ideas are welcome on all these things and things I fail to mention.
There are more than thousand networks running UnrealIRCd. I hope we can find some way to get at least the costs covered.
Statistics: Posted by Syzop — Fri Feb 02, 2024 11:41 am — Replies 10 — Views 1193