Since the demise of our old faithful server 1.UKGPL at the end of Season 17 we have been using a mixture of dedicated games servers that we have been able to borrow from other leagues and various home-based servers running on domestic broadband connections. This has resulted in some hectic race organisations and unfortunately very bad lag on some occasions and so for Season 19 we have decided to opt for a dedicated games server of our own. Well not quite.
Thanks to Fulvio Policardi, we were fortunate to have the use of the
Team 7 server for much of Season 18 and without it there would have been no racing. So for Season 19, Team 7 have agreed to make the arrangement a little more formal. They will continue to rent the server from the provider, with all the legal and financial obligations that entails, but they will allow us to use the server on our race nights (Sundays and Tuesdays). Team 7 will use the server for their own races on the other nights. In return we will collect donations from the UKGPL drivers and so contribute to the upkeep of the server.
The arrangement with Team 7 is informal but the following calculation illustrates the sort of donation that would fair:
The server rental quarterly cost is about £300
Note: this is for a server with full admin rights. A cheaper “games” server only allows users to use the installed games. For GPL we need full admin rights to install the game and all the patches and modifications.
So sharing the server 50:50 with Team 7 means we should contribute £150 per quarter. But if we calculated the cost based on the number of race nights (2 out of 7) then we should contribute about £86 per quarter. Provided we stay somewhere between those limits hopefully the arrangement with Team 7 will be harmonious. I’m sure you can decide for yourselves what a fair individual contribution would be based on the number of active drivers in the league.
The “Server Costs” Meter at the top of the UKGPL pages will indicate how healthy the server fund is. If the server meter is in the red then it is hoped that the UKGPL drivers will recognise the fact and contribute as they see fit. To make the process of contributing as simple as possible Vlad Vosblod will administer a PayPal account on behalf of UKGPL. It is appreciated that administration costs levied by PayPal are quite high but it is the easiest way to get the server fund started. We may migrate to a cheaper method in the future.
When the meter at the top of this page goes into the red a donate button will appear. Clicking on the donate button will take you to a PayPal web page where you can donate if you wish. Please note updating the meter is a manual process so don't expect it to move once you have placed a donation. The admin staff will periodically (hopefully quite regularly) update the meter balance to reflect the true balance in the PayPal account. Once the meter is in the green the donate button will dissapear. We don't want to be collecting money when we don't need it!