Donate to PDXModshop

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You might think that this site generates a profit, but it really doesn’t. This site, and most of the other sites that I host, are mainly hobby sites. That is to say, they exist to promote my hobbies and to help and encourage others to join in those hobbies. I’m just a regular Joe Shmoe, working a 9 – 5 job and fixing electronics as a side hustle to make a little extra cash, in fact, most of the money from my side hustles gets poured into maintaining these sites. I might sell stuff here, but its mainly to put it in the hands of aspiring modders. It hardly makes me enough money to afford any luxuries, and I’m fine with that, as it is not what it is for. I didn’t make this site because of some illusions of grandeur or wealth. I made it to bring people together. For more about me, you can visit PDXModshop’s About page.

Aside from me, it is my hope that this site gathers a community around it, and that others affluent in the art of console modding are attracted to the idea of submitting new articles or editing existing articles with new or improved information. To that end, I cannot stress enough, the importance of supporting these members who, likewise, decide to contribute their time and energy to improving the site.

Surprisingly, there’s a lot going on at PDXModshop. Monthly expenditures are always in flux. We sell items in our store, in hopes of covering these costs, sure, but these items have an overhead that takes away from overall profits. A majority, if not all of store profits go towards procuring more inventory for the store. Sometimes, the profits from our store are not enough to cover the baseline for our costs of operating our site and store. For this reason, we have setup donation pools for those of you who wish to actively support PDXModshop.

We have setup specific links on PayPal to help with collecting funds for specific pools that support the site. However, if you wish to donate to a particular staff member or contributor in return for their articles, support or help, then please feel free to scroll down and find their name to actively support them.

DISCLAIMER: If you choose to donate to a specific staff member or contributor, then PDXModshop cannot determine what it will be used for, nor will we attempt to govern what that author decides to use their proceeds towards. Your donations serve as a “thank you” and if third-party contributors receive donations from you, they may use them as they see fit.

Please select from the following donation pools:
Overview | Web Hosting Pool | Cloud Storage Pool | Support Contributors

The Web Hosting Pool

0% $0 of $91.74

In an effort to bring our users the most fluid experience on our site, we have elected to lease a Virtual Private Server (VPS) instead of using Shared Hosting. If you didn’t already know, when you setup a site on shared hosting, you share all of a systems resources with other peers who are also hosting their own websites. All of this data is tied into the same CPU usage, the same RAM usage, the same hard disk buffer and the same IP address. During peak hours, this can cause slowdowns across all of the sites that are hosted on that one machine, and if someone is being malicious, then all other users that are sharing that IP address could find their IP has been blocked on other services across the internet.

A VPS is the polar opposite of this, our site is alone on the PC and shares no resources with anyone else, nor does it share its network bandwidth or speed with anyone else. The downside? Cost and security. When you lease and setup a VPS, you are responsible for updating the system kernel and packages, setting up the hosting panel, running backups and all of the security measures put in place. I host my other sites on this VPS as well, most of which do not use as much bandwidth. In an effort to maintain transparency, I have provided an analysis of my VPS and its IP address showing such.

Here’s what PDXModshop’s monthly cost of $91.74 goes towards:

  • Yearly domain registration for pdxmodshop.com
  • 1Gbps Network Interface VPS w/ 32TB of Network Bandwidth
  • 10 vCore Processors
  • 60GB RAM
  • 2TB SSD
  • CloudLinux OS
  • cPanel Web Host Manager
  • JetBackup daily backups
  • Google GSuite for backup storage
  • Imunify360 Firewall and Malware Detection
  • KernelCare updates in real-time
  • LiteSpeed Web Cache
Total Cost: $91.74 / month

Unfortunately, all of these features, while greatly enhancing the speed and proficiency of the site, add to the underlying operational costs. Your support in helping to alleviate some of this monthly cost is greatly appreciated.

The Cloud Storage Pool

0% $0 of $12.24

To preserve storage on our main server and offset some of the bandwidth consumption, rather large files and download mirrors are stored on a separate object-storage bucket. This helps keep this site fast while also saving precious space and bandwidth.

As the site progresses, it is our hope that there will be a multitude of users who visit the site and decide to contribute their time to helping to improve the site. These users may choose to do something as mundane as editing pronunciation and spelling errors, or even writing new pages, guides or troubleshooting methods. For this reason, we want to allow other users of the site to actively support them as well; and not just the site.

You may select from below a user you would like to actively support with a one-time donation to a site of their choice. This list will be updated on occasion as members come and go, so keep an eye out, if your fellow community member is not on this list yet, they may well soon be.

dbrown1986 (Guide Author)

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