AmateurWire Needs Your Support
AmateurWire is in need of the support of its users. This has been a very fun project to work on and has lead me to meeting some great people along the way but it has began to get a bit heavy for me to carry financially alone. While I love providing this service for free to all Amateur Radio Operators it is not free for me to run. It has become a larger financial burden in recent months and I have been struggling to keep it alive. I run this service from my home on server equipment that was also donated to the cause by other people and am trying to do all I can to keep the service active. At this point I do not plan to shut down AmateurWire but it is something that has weighed on my mind recently. Let me be clear that my first option will be to downgrade the current internet service to try and ease the costs but even that may not be enough in the long run. There is hope on the horizon but it’s not coming as soon as I had hoped. We do have internet service providers running fiber through my area but service is not looking like it will be available for at least a year or more. I have contacted them and tried to get possible prices on everything in hopes that it will be cheaper than the current service I am running but have yet to receive a response.
While I will never REQUIRE as monthly fee for this service I am asking those of you who have the ability for help. This has been a truly rewarding experience but it has also turned into a financial burden on me and my family. The current internet service to keep AmateurWire running is costing $226 monthly and that price even may rise in the near future as the special deal I got on the service comes to an end. I do wish I could afford to register with the IRS as a 501C3 organization and make your donations tax deductible but at this time even that is an expense I can not afford. This is my plan in the future though.
If we could get every user registered with the service to donate even $1 a month that would pay for the current internet service for two months. I know this is not likely to happen and believe me I truly understand as I too am living the same struggle as many others and again I am never going to require a monthly service fee for AmateurWire but I am asking that any of you who have the ability to donate please consider it as this is not free for me to run. It has been through the generosity of others that this service even came into existence and it runs every day on that generosity.
Donations do not even have to all be monetary. If you have extra computer hardware laying around such as 3.5 and 2.5″ hard drives that you no longer need…. If you have also ran servers before and have spare parts laying around collecting dust that would work with our current systems we would also accept those to be put up as backup in case something goes wrong with our current hardware. If anything broke in the current server I am running it would be a tough time getting new parts to keep things alive. I do have a couple of servers though so while service could be restored fairly quickly it would not run quite as well as the other servers are older and have even more outdated hardware than the current machine. So what I am asking is that if you have the ability to make donations of hardware or financially please consider helping ensure I can keep this service running. I will continue to do all that I can to make sure this service stays alive even if that means going with a cheaper internet plan but as of right now I have only one provider in my area that even makes all of this possible. The other providers either do not have service in my area yet or have data caps that would make running this type of service and the others I run impossible.
For anyone considering donating hardware the current server everything is running on uses 2.5″ Sata or SAS hard drives and can only accept up to 2TB in physical size.
Other things we would like to have in backup is a power supply or two, fans etc…. The current server is a Dell PowerEdge R610 so any parts made for that are what we are looking for. Our recent power outages and surges have made me concerned for the future health of the power supplies and as soon as I can personally afford these things I will get them but if anyone has these things laying around or wants to send some this way it would be greatly appreciated. The address to send them to is good on QRZ for the callsign KE8LCM
If you even have experience with VMWare ESXi or FreePBX a donation of your help in keeping things running would be greatly appreciated. If you would like to know more about this feel free to contact me either by email or by joining our Jitsi chat sometime. All help, financially, Hardware, Administration is greatly appreciated and valuable.
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