Donation Drive for the WSGF

I have never really done this before, but I am now coming to the community and asking for your assistance in covering our monthly costs. Recent changes in our hosting costs, and current advertisers has brought me to the decision that I need to ask the community for help.

The WSGF has always been open and free. We don't charge for any of our information, our solutions or site access. Many other sites require you to register to view certain sections of their forums, search their forums or view/download attachments to articles and forums. I can't stand that, and we will never do that. The WSGF isn't at risk of shutting down. But your donations will help take a lot of stress off of me, and it will help us continue to grow and expand. We want to do more for the community, and offer more. We just can't do it all by ourselves.

Update: Thanks to everyone who donated. We hit our first goal on 5/25. Like all that Kickstarter stuff, I'm going to put in a stretch goal. I'd like to see if we can cover the costs for the awards that we sent out in February.

Here's a few questions I figure some folks might have, or might ask, so I'll try and answer them proactively:

What do I get for donating?

You get a nice warm fuzzy feeling in your heart. If you donate $25 or more, I'll add the "I Donated" badge to your profile. If you donate $100 or more, I'll also add the "Like a Boss" badge to your profile. Please note - Prior to this donation drive, the *ONLY* people on the site to have the "Like a Boss" badge are the four-man Admin Team (skipclarke, AussieTimmeh, CrackerJackMack and Delphium).

So, what's changed in the financial situation and what are your hosting costs?

I started the WSGF back in October of 2003. Back then hosting costs were minimal. I paid about $100 month to host the WSGF, along with a number of other websites for friends and family. All in all, this wasn't too bad. Within a couple of years we had outgrown that hosting, and moved to "bigger and better" solution. I ended up purchasing my own server with the host, and then bandwidth costs ran a minimum of $250/month.

Most of these costs were offset by the few advertisers we had been able to attract. Now, that was $250/month, minimum. High bandwidth months cost more, with months often hitting $400. The month of the original Bioshock brouhaha (when we were featured on G4TV), I almost fainted when I opened an $850 hosting bill. Of which, all of this cost came basically with no help and support from the host on any technical manners (well, they did at $50/hour).

Over time advertisers come and go, and at some point I reached out to the Insiders and asked if they knew of any potential advertisers as the site was back to costing me a significant amount of money each month. CrackerJackMack graciously stepped up and said that he would be willing to host the WSGF on a server that he already had and was paying for. This offer was like mana from heaven. Not long after this move, we were lucky enough to start our relationship with Ergotech and they would be what I consider to be our first major advertiser.

The next two years (2010 and 2011) were good financial years for the site. We no longer had a monthly host cost, and the revenue coming in allowed me to do a couple of things. It allowed me to "pay myself back" for seven years of hosts costs and such. It also allowed me to build a new test rig (and keep it updated), so that our benchmarking and hardware reviews would remain relevant in the marketplace. It also allowed me to fund game giveaways during the Steam Sales, an placate my wife a bit for all the hours I put into the WSGF.

So, now in 2012 things are changed again. Due to a few factors, CrackerJackMack is no longer able to offer free hosting for the WSGF, so we are now back with a $350/month hosting bill ($4200/yr). CJM is still helping to Admin the site, and we are on great hardware. The hardware and support we get for the $350/month is great. Additionally, Ergotech is no longer advertising with us (though we are now a reseller for their HD Triple Monitor line of stands). So, that leaves us with increased costs, and a lack of steady income. So, I am requesting your help to cover our hosting costs. Rather than come through each month and ask for $350, I figured I would do it twice a year.

Ergotech isn't advertising with you, but you're selling their stands. Don't those revenue streams just trade out?

Unfortunately they don't. You may remember that we were also running an ad for one of their resellers (Mounted Concepts). I replaced that ad, with the ad for the WSGF stand store. So, I am actually down two advertisers, for the one new set of ads. The margin on the stands isn't what you might think they are, and there is added work and time on my part to run the store and manage the orders. At this point, the income from the stands isn't yet matching the guaranteed income from the two ads we're no longer running.

What other costs do you have beyond hosting?

You'd be surprised. Over the last year or so, AMD gave us three new CPU/APU platforms to test. We got motherboard/CPU combos for the Brazos APU, the Lynx APU and the FX-8150 CPU. That's great, right? Well, I still have to supply the memory, case, power supply, drives, mouse and keyboard. That all adds up. At the end of 2008, I built a Core i7 test rig. By the end of 2011, that was looking long in the tooth, so I overhauled it as well. New motherboard, RAM, CPU, cooler, all of that adds up.

I've been using the same Mac Pro to produce content for the WSGF since 2006. It was getting painfully slow for rendering HD video (much less branching into 4k video), so I spent a fair amount updating the internals on that. And then there was buying a good mic setup so the audio didn't sound like I was at the bottom of a well. Then, don't forget the games we give away during the Steam Sales, or buying games just to test or have fixed.

There are also other tests and reviews I'd like to do. I'd like to look at the real-world impact of using an SSD on gaming and framerates. I'd like to do a great shoot-out matrix of CPU/GPU and the gaming performance. I'd like to put together an amazing buyers guide for Eyefinity and Surround gamers, but, all of that takes money. Basically what I'm getting at is that most all income from the WSGF goes back into the WSGF, in one way or another.

Update: My wife reminded me of some other costs we have. Our 2011 Gaming Awards cost us almost a grand. Between the physical awards, the coffee mugs, the press release and all the shipping (domestic and international), that one "event" cost us right at $1000. I'm also in the process of trademarking the WSGF name. I'm trying to head off some naming issues, and prevent future squatting of domain names (some jackass wants $12k for wsgf.com). That is also a $500+ proposition.

Wait, the WSGF hasn't made you rich and famous?

Mildly famous, maybe. However, it certainly hasn't made me rich. The WSGF isn't my day job. It's basically a hobby that's turned into a low paying second job. I do have a day job, a wife, and three kids. I'd love it if I could do the WSGF fulltime. My wife would love it if all the time and effort I put into the WSGF brought some incoming into the family...

Didn't you just do a donation drive back in November?

Yes, we did. But it wasn't for the WSGF. All the money collected there went to dopefish (we sent him three new monitors), HaYDeN and Helifax (and a few others). A few years ago we also sent a set of monitors to Racer_S, as well. We've done a number of big drives for folks on the site who have developed solutions and fixes for the community. However, we've never really done anything for the site itself.

Thanks for your support. I hope we've made the WSGF a site that you value. I hope that you will consider making a donation so that the WSGF can continue to grow and evolve, and be even better in the future.