I have been thinking of shutting down the servers because the money its costing me could be better used elsewhere. Donations havent been that great, in spite of the fact that they are pretty full 24/7.
One last thought before i pulled the plug was to run ads, and the google ones i had tried before just dont work right on game servers.
But Pinion has ads set up specifically for steam game servers, so i decided to try that.
Its been about a week or so, and the results are good. The problems im having is that the ads play every round, but a trade server doesnt really have rounds, so i dont get the quantity i would on the other servers (mym and vanilla rotation). But the volume looks like it should be enough to offset most of the costs, so Im going to keep the servers up.
The bad news is that they pay 60+ days after month end, quite a long time, so i still have to find 2 more months worth of server payments, and of course make up for the shortfall if we dont get enough donations.
In any event, as long as the traffic holds up, this should fix this issue, and the servers should stay up.
We are still taking donations however to try to cover the current costs. As a added benefit, donors dont get the ads!
And we also set up a new site dedicated to donations, donate.NBSclan.net - give it a try!
One last thought before i pulled the plug was to run ads, and the google ones i had tried before just dont work right on game servers.
But Pinion has ads set up specifically for steam game servers, so i decided to try that.
Its been about a week or so, and the results are good. The problems im having is that the ads play every round, but a trade server doesnt really have rounds, so i dont get the quantity i would on the other servers (mym and vanilla rotation). But the volume looks like it should be enough to offset most of the costs, so Im going to keep the servers up.
The bad news is that they pay 60+ days after month end, quite a long time, so i still have to find 2 more months worth of server payments, and of course make up for the shortfall if we dont get enough donations.
In any event, as long as the traffic holds up, this should fix this issue, and the servers should stay up.
We are still taking donations however to try to cover the current costs. As a added benefit, donors dont get the ads!
And we also set up a new site dedicated to donations, donate.NBSclan.net - give it a try!