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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generate ago
WTF are you doing on Azure? You should rent or lease a dedicated server on OVH or hetzner, you will be paying much less
Atko ago
We used to do that. We leased dedicated servers from hosteurope and they shut our servers down with no warning. Freedom of speech is not welcome everywhere, especially not in Germany (hetzner is a German provider as far as I know). Voat wikipedia page has more on this.
Voat should go on-prem and do it in the US, not Europe. Voat Linux port would not save much (only licensing fees which are irrelevant when compared to the hardware costs), but going on-prem opens a whole new can of worms and requires full time staff on location. To avoid shutdowns, Voat essentially needs its own datacenter (like stackoverflow) or a freedom of speech friendly datacenter which I do not think exists outside of Azure or Amazon(?). Important thing to keep in mind is that Voat is constantly under DDoS. Hetzner and OVH used to simply unplug servers which were under attack. I don't know their "mitigation strategy" today but they both have a dark history in my book. All in all, Voat is not easy and attractive to host. Voat needs an angel, or a boatload of small angels.
turn-down-for-what ago
Aside from physical hardware failure, why would you need constant on-prem staff? IPMI should give you all the control you need over software/os failures.
Most DCs have a NOC that can swap out bad drives, etc. for you. And most will let you keep a small stock of spare components at the DC for emergencies.
Synxsynxsynx ago
Or me. Pay the electric bill. Buy the hard drives you need for storage when they die. I have a gigabit municipal connection. I am allowed to host whatever. I have netapp ds2246 for cache and 4 ds4243's for storage and two FAS3250 filers.
It's my equipment. I own the rack, the connection, its uplink, the UPS. From end to end the entire thing is personally owned and I have the knowledge to maintain it. Tap me when you need me.