Hello Vaultlings,
We just wanted to follow up with a great big THANK YOU! to all of you for making our first year excellent. We've had some ups and downs, made some big changes in our first year, and have more coming soon for you guys. THANK YOU!
We had some excellent results for our VaultOberFest fundraiser, bringing in $250 in donations throughout the month. Our anonymous benefactors were great, and both donated their full amount, bringing our grand total for the benefit drive up to $1250! Holy smokes guys!
We have already put this toward the community, making a few one-time purchases to secure the future of the community for the forseeable future! We have purchased our own hardware server and it is currently hosted on free, donated bandwidth. The tests we've run so far show a miniscule bump in player ping times from our old Chicago datacenter, and our throughput is actually faster. You may have noticed us giving it a burn-in test this week for the halloween event, and we have to say WOW is this machine AWESOME. For the nerdy crowd, here are the server specs:
HP Proliant DL580 G5 4u server chassis
4x Intel Xeon E7330 Quad Core CPU @2.4GHz
8x 146GB 10000RPM SAS hard drives in RAID6 (+1 spare for emergencies)
64GB fully buffered ECC DDR2 RAM
HP iLO controller (This is a remote KVM we can use to work on the server in case of network issues.)
We've also purchased a new XenForo license, as well as licenses for the PostRatings plugin and for the professional version of PiperBawks. In addition, we're working on transitioning to a new gameserver control panel (the old one has been discontinued by the publisher...) that VintagePC is very impressed with. It is going to open some new doors for us in terms of VIP and donator benefits for the community. More to come on that later!
Finally, we paid for October and November with our old gameserver box, which will give us enough time to get the gameservers tranferred over to our new machine.
This has been an excellent month for our community. We are now to the point where our *monthly* bills are now $0. Because of this, we're pleased to announce we'll be going *AD FREE*! That's right, no more annoying ads, no more shady sidebar ads featuring questionable penguins. We weren't seeing much of a return for them, and as operators were tired of looking at them.
We'll still have a couple of annual renewals, and we'd like to see donations to continue, as we want to put a couple of spare server parts on the shelf, and want to run contests on a more regular basis. Your donations will all bring more tangible benefits to you, as we no longer need to worry about how we're going to keep our servers up for next month. We've truly hit a milestone here for the community.
We just wanted to follow up with a great big THANK YOU! to all of you for making our first year excellent. We've had some ups and downs, made some big changes in our first year, and have more coming soon for you guys. THANK YOU!
We had some excellent results for our VaultOberFest fundraiser, bringing in $250 in donations throughout the month. Our anonymous benefactors were great, and both donated their full amount, bringing our grand total for the benefit drive up to $1250! Holy smokes guys!
We have already put this toward the community, making a few one-time purchases to secure the future of the community for the forseeable future! We have purchased our own hardware server and it is currently hosted on free, donated bandwidth. The tests we've run so far show a miniscule bump in player ping times from our old Chicago datacenter, and our throughput is actually faster. You may have noticed us giving it a burn-in test this week for the halloween event, and we have to say WOW is this machine AWESOME. For the nerdy crowd, here are the server specs:
HP Proliant DL580 G5 4u server chassis
4x Intel Xeon E7330 Quad Core CPU @2.4GHz
8x 146GB 10000RPM SAS hard drives in RAID6 (+1 spare for emergencies)
64GB fully buffered ECC DDR2 RAM
HP iLO controller (This is a remote KVM we can use to work on the server in case of network issues.)
We've also purchased a new XenForo license, as well as licenses for the PostRatings plugin and for the professional version of PiperBawks. In addition, we're working on transitioning to a new gameserver control panel (the old one has been discontinued by the publisher...) that VintagePC is very impressed with. It is going to open some new doors for us in terms of VIP and donator benefits for the community. More to come on that later!
Finally, we paid for October and November with our old gameserver box, which will give us enough time to get the gameservers tranferred over to our new machine.
This has been an excellent month for our community. We are now to the point where our *monthly* bills are now $0. Because of this, we're pleased to announce we'll be going *AD FREE*! That's right, no more annoying ads, no more shady sidebar ads featuring questionable penguins. We weren't seeing much of a return for them, and as operators were tired of looking at them.
We'll still have a couple of annual renewals, and we'd like to see donations to continue, as we want to put a couple of spare server parts on the shelf, and want to run contests on a more regular basis. Your donations will all bring more tangible benefits to you, as we no longer need to worry about how we're going to keep our servers up for next month. We've truly hit a milestone here for the community.
