Since Stark decided to go and trash my business for no reason this morning: Thought I'd post the following from his website.
AC Crew open letter:
For a long time I have been flirting with the idea to write an open letter to the community – AC has grown from a small project back two years ago to a respectable size
Webpage with a very active and engaging community –
but apart from me moaning about the lack of funds and my monthly battle with my highly pregnant wife when it comes down to paying the server for AC (at least she cannot run that fast anymore) we have never really explained what goes on in the background.And I think it is time for me to lay some of the ugly truth open for everybody to see.
So bare with me this will be a quick but dirty ride.
First of all let’s talk about the elephant on the couch everybody tries to ignore so desperately.
AC is big enough that it needs its own dedicated server (YouTube for instance has 3000 of much more powerful servers) – to give you guys the best possible speed when it comes down to streaming your videos we are paying for an unmetered 20mbps connection – Total price (not including extra backup space and upgrade of database)
$550.- that’s money that I have to pay on a monthly basis – with Donations and ad incomes I have to pay an average of $300 a month – And let me tell you folks my wife can be scary when she get’s angryThe problem that we as the administration of AC are facing is that the overall the server (hardware wise and also line wise) compared to the amount of page views and visits we have is not adequate anymore and cannot sustain the constant increase in traffic.
Every time you try to connect to AC and you see an Error message pop up, that is down to too many connections to the webpage – picture 1000 people trying to connect all at the same time to view a video – the video is 10mb large but the line we pay for is only 20mb per second unmetered… You can see for yourself how fast AC can run into connection problems.
So the simple and straight forward solution is to upgrade the server, the problem is that I have to personally finance this webpage and I simply cannot pay for another server upgrade which would bump up the overall bill to easy $800 pm, the ad incomes have steadily decreased and if it wouldn’t be for the brave and incredible generous donations from some AC members we would have closed this project a long time ago and I want to thank every single member and guest that has donated.
So let’s see what we can do to change this situation.
- Premium member ship (Even if the community has voted against it we are flirting heavily with the idea to only allow members that have paid for a premium account to view certain categories or maybe the Vid of the days).
- Adult ads – Pay the best but would be (in my personal opinion) a disaster for the overall community
- Selling shares of this webpage to the community – Idea came up a while back and we are discussing this
- And some other ideas which we cannot share at this stage
But let’s be honest all this doesn’t not have to even happen if the Community collectively donates to keep AC up and running – Think about it, if every single member donates $1 a month – We could make AC the biggest and fastest page around.
We have always focused on making this not our page but your page, the community drives this car – we as in the administration are just the steering wheel you guys are the motor and the wheels.
I want ever one of you who has a registered account think about this today – How much would you miss Apacheclips? If it would disappear tomorrow?
So if you have quarter, penny, a nickel, or a dime. Give it to that broke bitch Stark so his pregnant wife doesn't give him a Tiger Wood's style beatdown.
That's all, and don't step on my sidewalk again, Nico Richters
