Today we want to talk about money. A topic, which is currently also discussed in rFactor2’s forums. We spent a lot of money in all these years developing our mods and providing our website, devblog and forums. So far we handled all expenses ourselves, but to continue funding the required infrastructure for our future developments we’re looking into a few possible solutions to cover our expenses.
Where do we invest the money?
Let’s start with our current situation: at the moment we have a webserver which runs the website, the devblog and our forums. This server accounts for around 120€ a year. Also we have a server running Subversion-Server which is provided by one of our members.
As we had some technical problems with the SVN server lately and maintenance is all in done in our spare time, we decided to look for a different solution.
One idea was to rent a root server and to run the webservices and SVN together on one server only. Given the server is powerful enough another idea was to run a rF2 dedicated server on that root too. This solution would be pretty expensive with costs of about 660€ a year.
Another idea was to keep our current hosting package for 120€ a year and use a dropbox account as a SVN replacement. A suitable dropbox account for our needs would cost us about 10€/month. So that would account to at least 240€ a year and about 420€ cheaper than the root server idea.
We are currently evaluating further options. And are happy to get input in services and solutions we may have overlooked.
So far, we didn’t mention additional investments such as buying books about physics, F1 season overviews, technical analysis or magazines which help us in developing and improving our mods. Also we have subscriptions on websites to get access to high resolution pictures of the cars. That all did cost a lot of money and in the end everyone playing our mods profits from these investments. For example AndreasT bought all old Autosimsport magazines on e-bay to give the team a good base to start with F1 1994.
So you see that modding and providing forums/blogs/websites for our mods comes at a price. In our second article we evaluate our financing ideas and hope to get some feedback from you.
do some dev/modelling-streaming on twitch.tv and show your girlfriend sometimes…play some ads…profit
There are some neat hosting solutions out there that give you unlimited bandwidth and unlimited webspace for less than 100 euro/year. I’m not sure if that’s enough for you, but if you think it could help, let me know and I will post the one I have been using the last few years.
While you can never have enough webspace, this is not our bottleneck. The issue for us is, we need a service to synchronize all our source data over different PCs and platforms. So far we use Subversion which hosts all files and everybody checks in his changes or downloads all updates. We currently try dropbox and are curious if we oversee other solutions.
I hope you guys (and other important modders) get free rF2 codes at the least.
What internet transfer speeds do you all experience and generally have at the moment? Granted, I’m sure it will vary widely across your team.
When you sync up data, what speeds / how quickly does each user sync up?
Good question, I have download 600kpbs and up 80kbps. A regular sync is about 150mb which is one set of texture sources.
I do large uploads at my university, but those are usually just the releases.