Afternoon all! Once again, the bill for the COH Rebirth servers are now due.
Planned Bills (for six months)
Changes are abound!
As you may have noticed there is a number of changes to the pricing of the services we buy from the datacenter. This was largely due to the Coronavirus pandemic as well as a series of upgrades they performed on their infrastructure. Many of these have caused rolling outages but many of those were fixed and correct in a matter of hours. The total uptime of the servers (game and web) were roughly 98% to 99%.
A new charge is added onto this bill in the name of the new Beta server so that we can keep the live shard operating and all allow for an ongoing PTS server. The Beta server will be used internally by the programmers and developers to test new content. PTS will be used for the purposes of, as the name implies, public testing of the forthcoming patches and changes. This new server (+$240) will cause an increase in the total bill temporarily as we plan to shut down the server box we use for our Git repositories and merge it back into the Beta shard. In the Fall bill, you will see this reflected with the decrease (-$360) of the bill. (So in short: this bill will go up $240 compared to the last bill and will drop $360 in the next cycle when we remove the other server, for a total savings of $120.)
Additionally, another server had to be put back into service as Heroku, which was powering PPD Drone, removed their free service. Rather than pay for the lightest Heroku tier, it was decided to put the small box back on instead. Later this year, probably in the next month or two we will be starting, we'll be testing out a bot that will once again send petitions in game to the Discord server to notify our mods and admins of any issues in game. Plus one additional status service bot will be researched to report on the status of the shards.
The final total for all fees and additions is $1677.
How to Donate:Currently PayPal is being used to collect donations via "PayPal Fundraisers". PayPal is no longer fronting the cost of credit card fees, however and any incoming donations sent in will have their processing fee removed automatically. (PayPal removed the pools functionality which allowed free "donations".) Additionally, a few people have reached out to donate via Wise (f/k/a TransferWise) and while that is possible, will need to be handled privately. If you are an international player and wish to donate in Euro or GBP, you can reach out to me (retched) via Discord and I'll show provide details on how you can help.
DONATIONS ARE CLOSED!!! GOAL REACHED, SEE POST BELOW
I also, cannot stress this enough:
!!!PLEASE DONATE ONLY IF YOU ARE FISCALLY ABLE TO!!!
Most times we always end up with a bit of overflow. If you miss the cut, do not stress it. We still enjoy you and thank you for your time that you spend playing on COH: Rebirth!
The bill is due on March 1st, 2023. And any extra funds will be used to prepay the next six months in August 2023. Any questions, feel free to reach out on the Discord in DM or Forums in DM.
As always, please note that donating does NOT grant any additional benefits or rewards in game.
