ZUG costs and donations

[offroadgeek]

For those who care, I thought I would finally post some of the details about our costs, and the money that's coming in.

The monthly ISP charges are $314.76.  (since June 04)
Previous monthly ISP charges $200       (May 04 and before)

Paypal donations received:
September        $35
August              $10
July                  $50
June                 $0
May                  $70
April                 $40
March               $230
Total Paypal donations:   $435

Google adsense revenue:
September       $93.03
August             $108.40
July                 $85.29
June                $150.49
Total adsense revenue:   $437.21

We are currently not utilizing near the speed that we have available, so I've downgraded the service from 1.5mb to 768k.  This will change the monthly ISP fees to $220.  Once the new ZSI 2 is online, I expect the downloads to tax the bandwidth more, so I can up the bandwidth accordingly.

Also, I'm looking into joining a colo facility that caters to non-profit organizations.  This should help to reduce our costs, and allow for nearly unlimited bandwidth.  Speaking of non-profits, I'm doing the research now to make ZUG a non-profit organization.  More details about this to follow.

Lastly, thanks to everyone who's donated, and clicked a google ad.  It helps!

offroadgeek

[akpoff]

For those who care, I thought I would finally post some of the details about our costs, and the money that's coming in.

<snip>

We are currently not utilizing near the speed that we have available, so I've downgraded the service from 1.5mb to 768k.  This will change the monthly ISP fees to $220.  Once the new ZSI 2 is online, I expect the downloads to tax the bandwidth more, so I can up the bandwidth accordingly.

Also, I'm looking into joining a colo facility that caters to non-profit organizations.  This should help to reduce our costs, and allow for nearly unlimited bandwidth.  Speaking of non-profits, I'm doing the research now to make ZUG a non-profit organization.  More details about this to follow.

Lastly, thanks to everyone who's donated, and clicked a google ad.  It helps!

offroadgeek

Thanks for all the work you do on the ZUG!  It's a fantastic community.

I appreciate you taking the time to post the numbers.  They look pretty good but it seems like we could do more to help you shoulder the costs of keeping the ZUG online.

From a bandwidth-utilization perspective, what's sucking up the most?  Is it coming from the ZUG downloads section?  Perhaps one way to help keep the bandwidth usage in line would be to mirror the ZSI and other files.  Perhaps we could set up some mirroring similar to sourceforge where the requester is redirected to download from one of many download sites.  I looked at ibiblio.org.  They host numerous Linux distros and related projects -- most notably many sourceforge projects.  Perhaps they'd host the binaries for the ZSI and let the ZUG host the search interface.  I'd be happy to look further into it.

From a revenue perspective, it looks like there's an on-going monthly shortfall between income and expenses.  Have you considered setting up the ZUG as an Amazon affiliate.  Affiliates earn 5% (and up based on volume) for everything sold by a referral.  The ZUG could ask that reviewers and others make links to products and books on the Amazon web site.  I'd be happy to create an Amazon bookmark that takes me to Amazon via the ZUG referrer link.  Also, perhaps companies like ShirtPocket, SDG, japan-direct and others would be willing to pay to have a nice text ad for $25/month.  I certainly don't want to make the ZUG into a neon commercial-laden site.  I'm just wondering how we could build on the tasteful use of Google text ads.

Of course let's not forget donations.  Notes like this letting us know where the ZUG is are a huge help.

Thanks,

Aaron