HI
Sorry for no response so far but I'm trying to earn some money at the moment as well as looking at something you'll see below...
Couple of quick comments. Re a 'survey' I have no intention whatsoever of turning MDWS into any form of 'subscription' service as it then puts me under all sorts of obligation I just do not want and I get stressed easily unfortunately - as I learnt 10 years ago when I ended up very ill - but thanks for the thoughts and the various PMs.
When I started the project in July I had no idea what would happen of course. Okay it works and runs fine now and I imagine quite a few people are now relying on it and there is some useful data to be had and that's what was intended. I had hoped though that donations would be higher and voluntary without much prodding....
The cost of the server is mostly in the fact that it is fully Managed as Kitz remarked and I agree that the cost is pretty much the rate if you look around in the UK (and I can't recover the VAT either) - if it crashes or there's a problem I can't work out, I get helpful advice or it generally gets fixed literally in minutes of reporting it sometimes. It's fully backed up every night at 01:00 (as most of you are aware!).
The £21 server is similar in spec and has been fully running without any uploads for a week now but it's showing signs of being stressed just running the background processes (I suspect the are more instances of the VPS on the physical server). It's of course NOT managed (other than the hardware) and I am not a server manager I'm afraid. So if it went down it could be down for days while it's resurrected from the latest backup and so on - or I might just give up...
I would like to get everything to a state where it doesn't need much attention, I think most of the graphs etc needed are there along with other facilities.
Anyway thanks to those who have donated or have promised to do so if needs be There is nearly enough in the kitty to fund another month now on the current server and we might just need that....THE GOOD NEWS is that I have a pending offer of free hosting from a major well-known service provider with possible expansion of facilities as needed! Still waiting to get an agreement on various things but I'll post here as soon as there is an answer one way or the other. This will need another month of the current server to do this comfortably.
If this is on then the changeover planned for Sunday coming will NOT happen and things will carry on as they are for a few weeks at least.Please keep watching for more news.....