[Foundation-l] Grant meeting

Wed Feb 9 22:58:20 UTC 2005

--- Anthere <anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> As you all have probably seen, our budget is seriously
> increasing every trimester.

This is very true (although our budgets are quarterly). I heard yesterday that
many people thought the $130,000 budget was for the rest of the year. In fact,
that is just for the first quarter of this year (ends March 31st). 

We are throwing a lot more money at servers this time than we normally would.
This is largely due to the existence of the $40,000 grant and our want to
*finally* get ahead of traffic increases and have a server farm that is top
rate and very scalable. 

> It is my personal view that we cannot anymore entirely
> rely on donations by visitors, but must seriously seek
> other sources of income.

Last year our total income was $150,498.75 (in 2003 we took in less than
$20,000). Based on projected increases of traffic, how much we have spent per
1000 page requests just to keep up, and adjusting for Moore's Law, I project we
will need to spend about $165,000 to $195,000 on servers during the last
quarter of this year just to keep up (not for the whole year, just for the last
three months). 

That is *if* we continue to grow as fast as we have been (80% compounded each
quarter), *if* we don't find some way to be vastly more efficient, and *if* we
continue to rely pretty much only on servers we buy. 

Lots of ifs, but it is still an important thing to consider as we move forward.
The plan for Google hosting will greatly reduce the amount of money we need to
spend as will other hosting offers. I imagine that grants will at least be
needed to build extra capacity (playing the role of the current $40,000 grant
this time). 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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