Edit:
I'm simply blown away with you goats. I was expecting a somber farewell in this thread but instead you've done the exact opposite; pulled off a rally at the bottom of the 9th. On a personal note, and this may seem sentimental, but you have given me a new hope for Voat at very dark time for me.
All I can say now is: Let's do this! I think your message is clear. We have a ton of work to do, a short window in which to do it, and I fully understand I can't do it alone. We will need all hands on deck if Voat is to have any chance at survival.
I will post the plans I have for Voat as well as a status update on your contributions by Monday.
P.S. Old goats, be nice to the new kids. ;)
Original Post
As I sit here about to write one of the most difficult announcements yet, I was just reminded that my account is one month shy of three years old. Nearly three years ago I came here from Reddit when the vote counts disappeared and I felt I could no longer trust what I saw. Nearly three years ago I met @Atko and started contributing code because I believed in him, his mission, and what he was doing. So much has happened during these last three years.
I know a lot of you are new, but Voat has been through a wild ride, and never at any point was it an easy one. My memories are bittersweet when it comes to Voat. I’ve sacrificed the best years of my life for Voat, I’ve lost my business partner whom I miss a lot, I’ve lost people in my life, I’ve given up golf which was my passion, and even with all this I still believe in Voat. I still see the dire need for Free Speech in this world, I fear a world without it, and I still will do anything I can to continue providing it.
But alas, I am powerless to keep Voat running without financial support. As of right now Voat has no solid commitments. Voat has always needed a financial partner whom had balls of steel and backing deep enough to give Voat the capabilities to run as an actual business (being able to hire staff and set itself apart from its competitors), not just a one man show. Potential investors have one or the other of these traits, but we have yet to find one with both. In this day and age, this is Voat’s unicorn.
In the past Voat has been lucky enough to be part of special programs designed for startup companies which gave us free licensing on various products and significantly reduced hosting costs. These programs have since expired and we are now paying full costs. Last month was our first non-discounted month on Azure and the usage was $6,600.90 USD. Donations, ads, and merchandise only put a dent in this and this is the primary reason why we have not launched another merchandise run. And begging for donations was always something we hated doing.
I’m writing this announcement to prepare this community, and the Voat family, for the possibility of a closure. I’m not certain on timing and I have too much invested in this place to give up just yet, so I cannot provide any timelines. In the meantime, I will soon be scaling back all Voat’s servers by at least 50%. I will also turn off some features that are resource intensive.
Voat needs funding. Without it, Voat will be no more.
Voat needs an Angel
Canary
https://voat.co/v/announcements/1330806
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neogag ago
What kind of product licensing? Please tell me you aren't paying for Microsoft SQL Server. Replace all those licensed products with open source equivalents.
Maybe silly suggestion, as I haven't seen your codebase: benchmark and optimize so you can use cheaper hardware to host this thing.
PuttItOut ago
The code has just recently gotten to a place where we can optimize it. It is on our list but we need staff, it's simply too much for me to continue doing alone. So, if funding does happen, this will be one of the first things done.
We have been working our data access code to be able to port to pg, but to answer your question, sql is not a significant cost for us right now. This will not always be the case.
go1dfish ago
What is? bandwidth? CPU?
sakuramboo ago
Bandwidth is always the killer. Storage is always pretty cheap, especially on AWS.
neogag ago
The site is all text which compresses well with gzip, so I wonder if it really is bandwidth that's the issue. He mentioned licenses, I'm dying to find out what product licenses!
sakuramboo ago
Text doesn't get compressed when transmitted, though. And, with the added SSL layer, that's even more.
Bandwidth is always the cost killer of any site, unless you are a specialized company dealing in big data or data processing, etc. You pay for every bit that goes in and out of your network. So, that asshole who hits F5 for 2 hours because you called him a lame-ass, unless your site has a free caching service, you are paying for that.
Yes, licensing costs are also a huge factor, but not as bad as it was 15 years ago. However, I do agree that porting everything to Linux/PHP/Postgres would be a pretty big cost savings, too (though, not as much as one would think. Azure/AWS is still pretty cheap).
heebykikeburger ago
Could a restful/dumb backend with something like React on the client save a shitload of bandwidth?
neogag ago
I'm launching a service soon and that's what we're doing. There is no need for complex abstractions on the server side (MVC); Microsoft platforms encourage that, but it's a huge hindrance and reduces productivity.
If you go with REST, you can go stateless (JWT) and not maintain session on the server at all. This lets you scale horizontally very easily.
heebykikeburger ago
Nice very modern.
neogag ago
Gzip does compress the request/response payload before transmission and it gets decompressed when it reaches its destination (browser/server), so it does reduce bandwidth usage, very significantly on a pure text site like this.
This page, for example, gets reduced by a whopping 85% thanks to gzip. https://checkgzipcompression.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fvoat.co%2Fv%2Fannouncements%2F1866053%2F9138900