Hosting cost increases.

[pwillard]

I've hosted my FONT-related website since around 2005 or so. In the intervening years, I have suffered some setbacks but kept it going as a labor of love and a way to give back to the community. However, I am now at a point where I seriously need to reconsider if I can afford to keep the website operational. I'm reaching retirement age and my hosting costs are now about $229.00 bi-annually on a webpage I make $0.00 from. I'm looking for ideas. I don't really need to host on a web page, but it does make finding things easier. Like, I could just upload font files to the File Library, but there really isn't a category for that sort of thing. My intention was to always have an online readable PDF file to help people figure stuff out so a WEB site made sense. I'm not really sure I can continue to fund the website out of my own pocket and meet my retirement budget.

Looking for ideas.

[tarrant75]

Pete, you could try the GoFundMe route. I'm sure that more than a few members here would be more than happy to help out with as much as you've put back into the community

[pwillard]

Ok, I'll give it a shot. Taking your advice. thanks.

https://gofund.me/3bae17e5

[rdayt]

Happy to help.

Randy

[eric]

I've offered others the ability to provide free parking on our server for low impact sites. The same offer would apply to anyone who has a first class membership.

Since our servers are up 24/7, there's no incremental cost to hosting websites that don't require anything more than just rendering an HTML page and the occasional download. It would be your domain and branding.

Another option... AWS has a free tier for static sites (ie HTML and javascript/Ajax).

Looks like AWS dropped that

[TrainSimJack]

Pete, I've got a similar boat, have hosted my websites for 19 years, back then when I switched providers, web hosting was $3/month.
Somewhere along the line things have progressed to where I see bills in the $100-200 range a few times a year now.

While a go fund me is a great idea, it's not always easy.

Here's a few other options you might consider:

Github - If I recall, you can have one website per user account (not per repo unfortunately) but this might suffice. I think this is true for github free, but if not, the next paid tier is $4/month.

Namecheap.com - I've bought domain names from them in the past, which is why I thought to mention this, but. looking at their site they offer shared hosting for under $5/month.

DigitalOcean.com - Here you can rent a VM for as little as $4 a month, bandwidth is limited, so there might need to be another strategy for hosting actual files.

Google Drive - I believe you can store files in google drive and share that anonymously with anyone. OneDrive and Dropbox likely have similar options.

There are probably countless others too these are just what came to mind.

[derekmorton]

Or you could host the site at home if your ISP allows.

[kraus]

You can host PDF files using a Facebook group.

[Nels_Anderson]

I have several club or personal web sites that I used to host on the FlightSim.Com servers but obviously no longer have that option. A friend recommended hostinger.com and I ended up using that. By pre-paying I got 3 years for something like $140, which includes up to 100 web sites and email.

[rt35ge]

I've hosted my FONT-related website since around 2005 or so. In the intervening years, I have suffered some setbacks but kept it going as a labor of love and a way to give back to the community. However, I am now at a point where I seriously need to reconsider if I can afford to keep the website operational. I'm reaching retirement age and my hosting costs are now about $229.00 bi-annually on a webpage I make $0.00 from. I'm looking for ideas. I don't really need to host on a web page, but it does make finding things easier. Like, I could just upload font files to the File Library, but there really isn't a category for that sort of thing. My intention was to always have an online readable PDF file to help people figure stuff out so a WEB site made sense. I'm not really sure I can continue to fund the website out of my own pocket and meet my retirement budget.

Looking for ideas.

I suppose in the end it would be up to Neils and Eric, but host it here in a "miscellaneous" category which would have to be created. Or perhaps a category called Fonts? Don't know how the legal would work on that.......

[eric]

There's already a Reference category for items which are not directly related to any one simulator.

Fonts would be a perfect example. There's already a highway sign font in the Miscellaneous category. If there were enough, Fonts could be a distinct subcategory.

[pwillard]

Thank you all for your support. I appreciate the options provided and you have given me some good things to think about moving forward.

As usual, this community has been great and that's probably why I'm still here.

[jdgremsjr]

Thank you all for your support. I appreciate the options provided and you have given me some good things to think about moving forward.

As usual, this community has been great and that's probably why I'm still here.

PM me, I am a retailer of webhosting services and I will wholesale you some services but don't want to publicly announce what those prices will be but the retail prices can be found at https://jnd-websolutions.com. Which aren't that unreasonable and are about a 1/4 of what you are paying now.