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So, in the background, the owners of the PBC have been working with staff to get the site moved over to a new legal entity and continue operations. This process is moving slowly, but it is moving, with the expectation that we should be able to fully hand off SN in the next month or so. However, the PBC has burned through its cash reserves, and we have an overdue Linode bill as is for $268 USD. I could write more, but the tl;dr, without money, SN will disappear off the Internet.
Most of the subscriptions understandably stopped due to the uncertainty with site ownership and management. However, we're not able to pay the bills with the trickle coming in. At this point, everyone involved has agreed with and are working towards a solution to move SN to a not-for-profit and 501(c)3, but we do need the communities financial support to get there. If we can raise $500 USD via subscriptions, direct donations, or other means, that would keep the site up past May. As such, if you have let your subscription lapse, or otherwise are able to support SN, please do so now.
Any funds raises will be donated to the *new* NFP as soon as it is able to accept funds. We'll run an update if/when we reach our funding goal.
- NCommander
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 07 2024, @06:08AM
Linode charges at the end of the month if you have a good payment history. SN has a past-due bill but let's assume it is their first one. That would mean that the latest bill arrived on March 1st and the maximum bill limit is $50 now. This means Linode will send you a bill whenever charges are $50 or at the end of the month, whichever happens first. We know that $500 lasts until May. Subtract $268 past due for months before March. That leaves $232 for future invoices. Since the bill limit is now $50, Linode will take the infrastructure offline 2 weeks after the unpaid bill is invoiced. $232 divided by 3 months (March, April, and May, with the first half of June coming later) is equal to $77.33, approximately. If you remove taxes and fees around 7.5%, that leaves around $72 a month. Which makes sense because the shared CPU plans are in multiples of $12. So their most-likely server setup at this point is probably 2 4GB boxes ($24 each) and 2 2GB boxes ($12 each). They could probably get it down to less, however, with some creativity, minor code tweaks, or exchanging redundancy for replication (or nothing at all).