New Server (and donations to EuroGA)

David has become progressively busy over the years and I agreed to take over the EuroGA hosting and maintenance of the site.

It has been moved to a new dedicated virtual server which happens to be around 3x faster. It is a high quality hosting service with proper backups. It is still behind Cloudflare for caching and DDOS protection.

The same code and database is running as before so absolutely everything should still be there, all the way back to when we started in October 2012.

Some small things are likely to break so it would be appreciated if everyone could give the site a good thrashing and post here anything which has been found.

Running EuroGA is very time consuming but also costs real money. As well as the cost of the server, backups, etc. I will have to pay for maintenance, fixes, changes, etc. I still firmly believe that advertising would be a bad move for a whole raft of reasons (even if it generated money, with so many people using ad blockers) and people find subscriptions frustrating, so a Donate button has been added in a few places so you can contribute voluntarily. It works with Paypal and the usual credit cards. Anything donated will go towards the running costs of the site, not 100LL Donations will not be published.

Thank you all for your continuing support.

Can you give a rough idea of the annual cost of maintaining EuroGA ?

Best part of 1k for the hosting, plus various extras like hardware for offsite backup storage, accountancy costs (have to file company accounts even if not making money) etc. The investment in time and later on paying others (I am not a Ruby programmer and don’t have detailed server config skills) are a lot more than these, however.

You have to make Donate button more visible. I really had problem locating it

That’s an interesting challenge

It is the biggest button which Paypal enables an option for, although there is an option to make a custom button.

I did wonder about other places to put it, but the site has to work on phones (a good 50% of users nowadays) and there the button appears at the bottom of the home page listing, so if you scroll at the way down to the “stop” you see it ok.

Very many thanks to those who donated already

I believe that the main problem with visibility will be the fact that majority of users go directly to recent threads page rather than to home page.

It was quite hard to find the button.

@Peter and @David: The links in the new thread emails are incorrect. The text is fine but the link itself points to a server which does not exist.