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All basic features are for free. Some nice additional services
are to be paid for. Have a look at our pricing
list for more information.
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This short text was written to explain the basic question: "why, if the gateway
is free, should I donate money?" and some related issues. All figures in this
text are in US dollars, because the Amazon honor system uses this currency for
payments.
In case you do decide to contribute, just use the "Click to Give" on the right
to make your donation. Any amount is welcomed.
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The following costs are associated with running this server:
| Equipment |
Clearly we have a computer, and, even though it
isn't an advanced system (MIPS 5900, 300 MHz, 32 MB) it is sufficient for
the task that it is performing. However, it is already rather old, and,
like all computers, it won't have an eternal life. I estimate that the
computer will fail within five years. Given the price of a new computer,
say $750, this means $150 needs to be reserved each year to make sure a
new computer is available when the time of the current one runs out.
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$150 |
| Network |
The
current network connection (2 Mb/s) costs $54 each month. Fortunately,
there are other people using the connection, therefore we only need to pay
half of this. It, however, still amounts to $324 per year.
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$324 |
| Administration |
Obviously
there are many other costs, like electricity and phone bills, as
well as people that work to prevent or recover from hacking and viruses.
As these costs can't be clearly specified, they are left out here. However,
there is one administrative cost which is clear, and that is the cost of
registration (which is required in the Netherlands). This cost is
approximately $50 per year.
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$50 |
| Total |
Each year |
$524 |
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You could also see the money as an incentive. Even if only a little bit of
money comes in via the WWW-site, this will encourage us to increase our efforts
to add new functionality, improve speed and offer new services.
Of course, other incentives, like feed-back forms and Emails are always
welcome too.
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This isn't meant to be threatening, but it is obviously possible that the
costs will eventually become too much for us to continue the service as it is
now. You have seen other WWW-sites, so you know the alternatives:
| Advertising |
Even though advertising doesn't pay as much as it used to,
they at least guarantee some level of income. Also, our site has high
retention factor, and allows for many advertisements in a single session.
As you probably noticed, due to the lack of donations last year, we have some,
hopefully unobtrusive, Google ads and search windows available. Let us know
what you think.
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| Premium services |
It is also possible that users will be separated in "paying"
and "non-paying" users, and limit the functionality for non-paying users.
Services like cliser, the JAVA client, or specific ports (like SSH, SMTP,
NNTP, HTTPS) would then only be available to people that contribute.
As you probably noticed, due to the lack of donations last year, we did limit
access to certain ports to donating customers. Let us know what you think.
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