To say the most important thing right at the start — thank you to all of our readers and friends who support RapReviews on Patreon. We couldn’t run this site without your monthly contributions given the server costs for an archive of over 10,000 articles and the bandwidth to deliver all of them to you. Unfortunately our webhosting partner gave us some bad news last week and I’m going to quote from them directly to let you know the state of our situation.

“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).”

This situation has been made worse by the fact we are bumping up against the storage limit for the size of the RapReviews archive. I tried to negotiate a free storage upgrade given the fact we were going to have to pay increased server fees, and once again I will quote directly from the email I received.

“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.”

We’re therefore stuck in a dead end situation where we are going to pay more either way, and presumably a whole lot more before it is all said and done. I’m never comfortable with coming to the readers with my hat in my hand, but your support matters now more than ever. I’ve increased our Patreon goal to $150 a month to cover these new server costs. I said that banner ads and pop up ads would go away when we hit $100 a month and I’ve not rescinded that promise (nor would I) but we need more patrons to join those who have already generously supported the site. If 25 new people pledged $2 a month or 10 people pledged $5 a month, we could meet this goal.

Whether you join the RapReviews campaign on Patreon or not, thank you for taking the time to read this message, and please enjoy the upcoming holidays with family and loved ones in good health. Here’s to a good rest of the year with an eye toward a bright future next year for us all!

Sincerely,
Steve ‘Flash’ Juon, RapReviews EIC