Torchmodders. Your attention please!

UPDATE: I've changed our hosting plan and we're down to €95.40 for 12 more months of hosting.

Our hosting plan is about to expire (Jun 19.) and we need to renew it, or find another host. At our current host (Siteground) it will cost €139.80 to continue the current hosting plan (GrowBig) for 12 more months. The torchmodders.com domain won't need renewal before Aug 7. Which will cost an additional €11.95.

If I had the money to burn I would just pay it and not fuss about it at all, but being unemployed, (since December last year) makes it a bit harder for me to fork out the cash right now. So I need some help from you guys to either help me pay for the current hosting or find a cheaper solution for hosting the site.

I would prefer to get the hosting price down, as I think our current plan is way too expensive. Even if this requires some work compared to just clicking a "renew" button.  So, does anyone of you know about a good quality and cheap host we could transfer the domain and our web services to? (We're running on Joomla, SMF and DokuWiki)

Hosting isn't something I know much about either, sorry can't be much of help there

Though I wonder what other sites like RGF and ClockworkCore use (if that's even relevant)?

Edit: Can also chip in to help if necessary.

Hi Wolven. First of all I'm concerned to hear about your employment situation; I was there in the mid-2000s and it lasted a few years. Very very very not fun, so I commiserate with you Wolven.

But I made it through. Things aren't all milk-and-honey but we're okay. And you will be too

Now about the hosting - I've only ever used free stuff so I can't really recommend a host and I'm not sure what our space requirements are. But I think, given the way we use this site, we could move over to a lot smaller package and be just fine. If we can get it down to under USD100 range I can chip-in with like 3 other guys.

Of course there's also free/ad-supported sites, but I guess those could pose (big?) problems for content migration.

Alright, cool. If you guys help chip in that would be great. I'll also pay my share, of course.

I've been looking around a bit for alternative hosting which compare to the service we have now, but the alternatives I've found are not really any cheaper. Like our current host it's cheap when you sign up, as you get a discount the first year, but after that you have to pay full price.

As it is now we're on the second cheapest plan that Siteground has to offer. ( ) As I upgraded from the cheapest plan to be able to have more than one domain, back when I registered torchmodders.com. I also have the torchlightarena.com domain tied to this plan, but I'm not using it, as my TLA mod is on ice and will probably be so for the foreseeable future. So I'll look into the possibility of dropping that domain and downgrading the hosting plan.

Let me investigate a bit more and see what I can do about reducing the cost, before we organize this "fundraiser". We still have a few weeks before the bill is due.

OK. So I got our host to downgrade our plan. They did this faster than I expected, which broke some stuff, as they had to move some files around. I'll try to fix all the file paths to get us back to normal.

EDIT: I think I've fixed the broken attachments now. Let me know if you find other issues.

BTW. We're down to €95.40 for 12 more months of hosting now.

Hostgator was one of the hosting providers I was looking at, but I concluded that moving over would not reduce the cost by much. (If anything) They're priced about the same as SiteGround and other hosting providers like DreamHost, etc.

Some years back when I developed my own Linux distribution, I hosted myself on a SHDSL connection and some old hardware. I had a static IP for a while, but the ISP dropped the service at some point. So used the Dynamic DNS service from no-ip.com  It worked great, but it was a bit tiresome to be both a developer and server admin at the same time. Was fun though, but I think the cost of the connection, electric power and labor made the ordeal much more expensive than to use a hosting company.

It was fun though and running a web server on a Raspberry Pi sounds like a nice project.You don't need a static IP to do it. Use a Dynamic DNS service like I did. I didn't notice any difference from having a static IP. Most major Linux distributions support the  Dynamic Update Client from no-ip and other DynDNS providers.

I dunno. I will pay the renewal next week when I get my check. Then you guys can reimburse me at your convenience. I'll give you my banking details. The total cost will be 95.40 EUR

Wolven, do you have Visa or Mastercard?