Regular Donations

[sexual_sushi]

I just donated some money again, the goal is to donate $10 monthly or bimonthly and I'll post here when I do so hopefully people will see it and think about donating again.

Cheers
Shaun

[gav240z]

I just donated some money again, the goal is to donate $10 monthly or bimonthly and I'll post here when I do so hopefully people will see it and think about donating again.

Cheers
Shaun

Thanks mate, and thanks to everyone who donates. I really appreciate it. Just a reminder that web-hosting costs around $170 AU per month.

Google Adsense makes us about $20-$30 p/month and donations really do vary each month between $20 - $70 (its hard to gauge exactly how much since members often donate different amounts at random intervals).

Whilst our web-hosting is not the cheapest, I believe the service we get is worth the money. I've been through 2 other hosting companies previously (as well as others for friends / family / work etc...) and there is nothing worse than having a bad hosting company.

I'm not sure what our up-time has been over the past couple of years, but off the top of my head its been pretty good and a large part of that is due to our host providing reliable servers.

So yes I could probably save some money here and there on hosting, but for me its not worth the headache.

Bottom line I guess is that I'm willing to spend a little bit extra on web hosting, but I appreciate any contribution made. If you don't have money to spare, you can contribute in other ways.

- Refer / encourage a friend to join the site
- Write up a technical how to article that we can make a sticky post for other members
- Write up a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) post - to address all those same old questions we get when people join.
- Arrange discounts for other Auszcar.com members through your own business or a local business
- Take the time to say hi to new members and make them feel welcome
- Submit details for a featured member ride on the homepage - this really helps me save time .
- Stroke my ego and send me thank you emails saying how much you love Auszcar.com (just kidding I get enough of those already).

You get the idea I hope anyway. 

[FLEXZED]

hey shaun

thanks for the reminder

i just donated as well

Loui

[zrevival]

Just a thought

I personally really enjoy the website and usually check it once a day - however i have my link set to go straight to the forums to look for new posts. This means that i completely miss the 'donation' link which is on the home page.

Quite simply - if the donation link was more 'in my face' then i would donate far more regulary to what is a terrific website, with a great bunch of regular members.

Maybe the donation link should also be on the forum pages as well as i would imagine that is where most of the regular members spend their time (made this assumtion without checking webstats)

Just a thought

 

[Mr Camouflage]

Thanks mate, and thanks to everyone who donates. I really appreciate it. Just a reminder that web-hosting costs around $170 AU per month.

Whilst our web-hosting is not the cheapest, I believe the service we get is worth the money. I've been through 2 other hosting companies previously (as well as others for friends / family / work etc...) and there is nothing worse than having a bad hosting company.

Jebus that is expensive.  WA Z Register is hosted with AussieHQ for around $250 a year (1 gig disc space, 10gig traffic per month, cpanel), and I haven't had any problems with them and support is great. (They bought out the old host we were with who were bordering on incompetent).

[gav240z]

Just a thought

I personally really enjoy the website and usually check it once a day - however i have my link set to go straight to the forums to look for new posts. This means that i completely miss the 'donation' link which is on the home page.

Quite simply - if the donation link was more 'in my face' then i would donate far more regulary to what is a terrific website, with a great bunch of regular members.

Maybe the donation link should also be on the forum pages as well as i would imagine that is where most of the regular members spend their time (made this assumtion without checking webstats)

Just a thought

 

I was thinking that perhaps what I should do is once a month post how much our hosting cost is, how much we earned from advertising and how much was donated so everyone can see where we are at in terms of hosting costs? I realise a lot of people visit the forum section of the site so perhaps I can put a rotating banner on the site as a reminder for donations too. .

[gav240z]

Jebus that is expensive.  WA Z Register is hosted with AussieHQ for around $250 a year (1 gig disc space, 10gig traffic per month, cpanel), and I haven't had any problems with them and support is great. (They bought out the old host we were with who were bordering on incompetent).

Yeah unfortunately we need more than 1 gig of space due to the gallery and image attachments on the forum. Our last plan was $50 p/month which was good, however unfortunately the forum activity was causing high demand on the CPU usage of the shared environment. You may recall I was upgrading software and trying all sorts of caching technology but it didn't seem to make much difference and the next plan was managed virtual private hosting which was a fair bit more expensive.

The hosting plan does allow me to host more than 1 website however, so I'm happy if we cover most of our hosting cost each month but not necessarily all of it.

The longer term plan is to eventually integrate the entire website into a single software package (instead of 3 different ones like it is currently) which will make the site maintenance easier and allow me to easily move the site to another host (maybe cheaper?) if required.

[sexual_sushi]

Ok so I missed out on my donation for March but I have just donated $10 for April.

If you've got a few spare bucks get donating now

[FuzzyDropbear]

Yup, sorry Gav, missed the last month or two as well.

Cheers mate.

[gav240z]

Ok so I missed out on my donation for March but I have just donated $10 for April.

If you've got a few spare bucks get donating now

Yup, sorry Gav, missed the last month or two as well.

Cheers mate.

No problems guys, thanks for the donation again. I'm going to look into some options for donating members = less advertising and non donating members get more ads etc..

Right now for every $1 we earn from advertising $0.25 cents of it comes from members who sign into the site. So 1 to 4 ratio. So it makes sense to look into an option like that.

Another reason to go the advertising route is that I don't like asking people for donations.

[Lurch]

If I had PayPal Gav, I'd throw a lot more $ the site's way. There has to be another way to donate as PayPal is a PITA to setup...

[Z]

I check this site daily to take me away from the BS at work and after hours alot as well (no life). But I think the comment about what $ we need for the month and what we have might be a good idea (counter of some sort)... If I read that we needed say $200 this month and we were at $120, I'd throw a tenner in. Anyways, just a quick show of support for this site - I've got some old parts I'll post up soon, some of them will be donated to auszcar.com.

[sco_aus]

On another forum I was on, they just did a graph for the month that showed how much left was need to cover the month, it made people think about it and donate.

[620Z]

I like the idea of having some sort of Balance Sheet to show donations versus expenses each month. Gav I reckon you would get a lot more people throwing in when a short fall occurs. Obviously it's not at the forfront of the members minds and if they don't know you are short then you might miss out.
Cheers

[Quandary]

I donated some time ago and got a confirmation email but it doesn't show in the Paid Subscriptions.  Should it?  Kind of worried money didn't go to where it was supposed to.