In case you missed it, last week I posted an update about a sudden and dramatic increase in the costs of hosting RapReviews.com. I asked for readers to join our Patreon campaign to help the site, and I suppose I expected new people to come on board as a result. That happened — but to my surprise several of our existing patrons increased their own monthly contributions as well! I am so humbled by this that I had to stop and take a moment to say thank you to both new and existing patrons for your support of the website. For more details on why we need your help I’m going to share the excerpts from our hosting company again below.

“Hi Steve, I’m sorry to inform you that the monthly rental for your server will be increasing effective December 2022. Our datacentre has negotiated their new electricity contract for the upcoming year, and the new rate is now 55% higher than their current rate. They have had to pass these cost increases onto us, although fortunately not to the same extent. Nevertheless, we regretfully have to increase the selling prices of our own products, as we would otherwise be making a loss on many of our servers, which would not be a sustainable situation. In general, this will take the form of a ~10% increase in fees. Frustratingly, cPanel are also increasing their licensing fees next month (as they have done for the past few years).”

When I asked if we could increase the server’s storage since we were running out of space for our 10,000+ reviews and articles, hoping they would throw it in for free with the price hike we were getting for hosting, I got a second response back.

“Hi Steve, It looks like your disk is indeed nearly full, with your total allocation being 200GB. Our standard rates for extra disk space for VPSes is £15/month per 50GB (we use high-speed mirrored NVMe storage for our servers so there is a cost associated with it). As a special deal for you, we could offer an extra 50GB for £5/month or 100GB for £10/month.”

So to make a long story short, everything about RapReviews.com started costing a whole lot more in November 2022, and those costs aren’t going away any time soon. Without your support we couldn’t do this work, so whether you support us now or plan to do so in the future, thank you and happy holidays!

Sincerely,
Steve ‘Flash’ Juon, RapReviews EIC