- Messages
- 53,737
- OOC First Name
- Nick
- Blood Status
- Pure Blood
- Relationship Status
- Married
- Wand
- Curly Oak/Wenge 16" Essence of Feng-huang Tail Feather
- Age
- 1/1989
We've seen a lot of changes in the last 15 years, and one of the biggest is still quite a recent memory for many of us: we moved to self-hosting!
While many of our unique niceties have always cost us a little extra money, the realities of self-hosting is that even the most basic things now cost us many a knut, sickle, and galleon. For transparency's sake: it costs about $700CAD/yr to keep the site at the level we've got it.
We offset this a little through ads - and so the main thing we'd ask you to do, no matter what, is to disable your ad blocker on HNZ. It can be your way of supporting us staying on the Internet and to help fund the next year of magic for everybody!
A little more transparency: the ads only bring in about $200CAD/yr (maybe more if you disable your adblocker for us)!
Generally, we've found ways to make this work over the last two years and it's been lovely to see the site flourish despite what could have easily been a catastrophic move.
Nevertheless, we see on the horizon a need to increase our hosting package (all your beautiful GIF avatars, maintaining a full database of all of your posts and a (surprisingly large - like way larger than I thought) database so that our search function works, it all takes up way more space than I expected. The cheapest way to pay for hosting is to pay for multiple years up front (which decreases the monthly cost quite a bit) - and that is a veryyy shiney galleon at the end of the day.
So, if you can spare it (and we know that many cannot!), we would invite you to consider supporting HNZ by chipping in to our Paypal pool. Last year our pool ended with five awesome donors!, and their donations totalled a generous $125CAD (which was amazing and we've saved for use in a possible hosting upgrade) - but if you can even spare $5 it can help so much, too!
With COVID-19 causing many to lose their jobs, with many of you being in school, or working jobs that really just pay for your living, we know that this isn't something you can all do and if you can't help: don't sweat it! Enjoy the site - it's here for you to enjoy without any worries at all about cost (although do think about disabling that ad blocker
). But if your situation is a little different and a few dollars could be spared, we'd really appreciate that, too, to help keep these birthdays coming!
Happy Birthday, HNZ!
EDIT: This post has been edited to more accurately reflect last year's total donors. (I was new to Paypal pools last year and somehow missed that there were more total donors than I think I got emails about! I blame Paypal.)
While many of our unique niceties have always cost us a little extra money, the realities of self-hosting is that even the most basic things now cost us many a knut, sickle, and galleon. For transparency's sake: it costs about $700CAD/yr to keep the site at the level we've got it.
We offset this a little through ads - and so the main thing we'd ask you to do, no matter what, is to disable your ad blocker on HNZ. It can be your way of supporting us staying on the Internet and to help fund the next year of magic for everybody!
A little more transparency: the ads only bring in about $200CAD/yr (maybe more if you disable your adblocker for us)!
Generally, we've found ways to make this work over the last two years and it's been lovely to see the site flourish despite what could have easily been a catastrophic move.
Nevertheless, we see on the horizon a need to increase our hosting package (all your beautiful GIF avatars, maintaining a full database of all of your posts and a (surprisingly large - like way larger than I thought) database so that our search function works, it all takes up way more space than I expected. The cheapest way to pay for hosting is to pay for multiple years up front (which decreases the monthly cost quite a bit) - and that is a veryyy shiney galleon at the end of the day.
So, if you can spare it (and we know that many cannot!), we would invite you to consider supporting HNZ by chipping in to our Paypal pool. Last year our pool ended with five awesome donors!, and their donations totalled a generous $125CAD (which was amazing and we've saved for use in a possible hosting upgrade) - but if you can even spare $5 it can help so much, too!
With COVID-19 causing many to lose their jobs, with many of you being in school, or working jobs that really just pay for your living, we know that this isn't something you can all do and if you can't help: don't sweat it! Enjoy the site - it's here for you to enjoy without any worries at all about cost (although do think about disabling that ad blocker
). But if your situation is a little different and a few dollars could be spared, we'd really appreciate that, too, to help keep these birthdays coming! Happy Birthday, HNZ! EDIT: This post has been edited to more accurately reflect last year's total donors. (I was new to Paypal pools last year and somehow missed that there were more total donors than I think I got emails about! I blame Paypal.)
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