JPF Home Page Forums General Messages General Message Forum JPF Fundraising: Need $ For Own Server and Lots of New Abilities

Hi Folks,

I am considering getting our own server for the JPF Site. What that would mean is much faster searches, much faster pages loading, and for the first time we could activate the ability for all of you to store songs right on the message boards (and potentially support for everyone to have their own web pages on the site). This is a big purchase (starting at 5K and going up for what we would need). The folks at Hostbaby have offered to transfer the site to our own server and take care of it (for tech problems and bandwidth) for us. This is a very tempting opportunity, but we'd need to raise a lot of money and it would be far more than we've ever raised combined in our site history. (In truth we've probably gotten about $4000 dollars worth of donations on the board over all the years we've done this). We have sponsor money, but all of that is earmarked for the Music Awards and Roadtrips, so this would need to be new money raised (or perhaps a new sponsor that could cover it).

I'd like to hear thoughts from all of you? Is there a way to raise that via donations on the boards? I don't want a "membership fee" because that would close down most of what we do to most of the folks who come here. It's going to have to be either straight out donations, or a some type of fundraiser.

Brian

Hi Brian.Im here with $100 to start you off on the upgrade.Thanks for all the years of letting me post here.Let me know if you want me to send it.

We could all buy Scott's CD

Have you tried pay per click advertizing like Google Adsense? I'm sure that with the amount of traffic that you get it would be worth a try.
You could paste a small ad on the home page for web surfers who are looking for something in particular. Just an idea. Ben

Let me know, I haven't got much money, but I will put in as much as I can.

Love the site, I will help where I can.

Learner to just plain folks.

Michele Bolton
Aussie girl from down under Australia.

I would be happy to donate. Here's one suggestion, though: Don't duplicate what is out there. There is no need for you spend the money on storage and bandwidth to store MP3's of folk's music -- It will add to tons of support questions and maintenance. As long as soundclick, myspace, virb, etc, etc, etc is out there, why and try and do that?

Kevin

Kevin,

I thought about that (i.e. just letting the free sites host it) but then perhaps we'd give even more of our 43,500 members a reason to come here and interact? About 500 members do 90% of the posting here. (And only 15K of them are even registered). If you could get feedback and post a new song right here, perhaps that would cause folks to hang here instead of hanging on Soundclick or elsewhere? Over the years we've sent 1000's of members to Soundclick and that's certainly helped them, but it's done nothing for us really.

Anyone out there an IT expert? Ryan at hostbaby said the minimum we'd want to consider is a 2ghz processor and 2gig of ram. But if we're going to do it, I think we should get something a bit better than the bare minimum. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to search the entire message boards almost instantly? Our own fast server will allow that.

Brian

I strongly suggest having Google ads on the main JPF pages as well as on the forums, preferably on the bottom. It's also possible to integrate ads on the forum for unregistered users, which disappear when you login. This encourages people to register and get involved, plus it generates extra income.

Also, if you could provide me with as much traffic information as possible, I could give you a good idea of what kind of server specs you would need, as well as ad revenue you could expect. eg. Monthly bandwidth used, average forum load, monthly unique visitors, monthly visits...

Brian,

You already know how strapped Helen and I are for money with her ecent medical ailments; but we would contrinute as much as possible. If we win a good law suit on this last episode, then we can do a lot more! We'll have to see about that.

I am a bit of a computer geek, though not an IT expert per se. I build and repair my own computers, except the laptops. For what you want to do, I would recommend no less than a 2.6 ghz process, preferably 3.0 or 3.2, and no less than 3 meg of DDR 2 RAM. Another consideration is the motherboard FSB (Front Bus Speed). I would go with nothing less than 1.8 ghz, preferably 2 ghz. Just my opinions.

Al

Andrew,

We're talking with some tech folks and Ryan and Hostbaby so we'll find the right model for our needs. Right now we're tracking Google stats and comparing them to our site's server stats and there's a big discrepancy. We don't know who is correct and who is not or why the difference exists yet. I am hesitant to plaster the site with ADS as we've never done that. Google ads place random companies, some I consider scam artists, into those slots and that would give access to our site and members to companies we don't believe in. That concerns me. If folks click those links, we just helped people we don't support. And if they don't, we don't make anything from them anyway. It's an issue for us.

Brian

Hi Al,

Thanks for the info and support, but obviously the last thing I want is money from anyone who needs it more than us and in your case you obviously do! I spend my life supporting and nurturing musicians/writers so I'd hardly take something from one who needs money so we could upgrade the website. = )

But thanks for the offer!

Brian

If not Google ads, you might consider soliciting companies directly and offering them ad space (x by x pixels; eg 137x48, or what have you.) KVRaudio runs ads from a wide variety of companies, from big ones like Soundsonline, Sony, and Steinberg, to small one and two man developers of audio software. These things would be relevant for the JPF audience, on the whole. Besides music gear manufacturers and retailers, you might look into publishers of music related books (eg. Thompson) or perhaps music-related magazines. None of these businesses have massive budgets, but even if they each put forth $25 a month to be added into some kind of banner rotation, that would be better than nothing.

Google offers a "filter" for undesirable content ads and you can choose the referral ads that you want on your web site. But you have to be vigilant because bad ads can slip through the cracks. The content ads are based on key words so they will be music related, but I understand your wanting to maintain integrity. Ben

Brian,
I own a large collection of show costumes and produce many stage shows with impersonators, showgirls, dancers, variety acts, etc. If you ever need any of my resources for a fundraiser, please let me know.

Another way to raise money is to get some items donated to JPF and place them on a special posting. Then, people can bid for the items. It can be like a silent auction where people post their bids. We could watch the posts as people bid more and more. It could be fun, especially if there is a bidding war! People could donate music related items, jewelry and anything of value.

This wouldn't take too much effort. Just some place for people to send items with a description and suggested retail price. Then, the person in charge puts the jpg and item description on the special posting along with an opening bid price, bidding increments and time when the auction will end.

Are you a 501-C? If so, you may only have a bit of paperwork to file to do this. Or, you can get the license to hold a raffle. Then, you obtain an item like a big screen TV or something like that, and you sell raffle tickets via paypal.

Just some ideas...



Heidi

Brian,

With the huge number of visitors coming to the JPF forums every month, would it be hard to find music related companies and services to advertise here? I own a songwriting company, a networking group, a music magazine and a songwriters conference, and I can tell you that I would be delighted to pay for advertising space at JPF! And I'm not even in the USA, which is your largest demographic!

Surely it wouldn't be hard to find bona fide advertisers - and big ones as suggested in an earlier post.

Lisa,

I've avoided clogging up the site with banner ads (something that turned my stomach, especially in the early days of the web). So we've never had them. Even our community partner sponsors who fund a lot of what we do don't get banner ads (and they pay a lot to support us each month). By keeping advertising to a minimum, it's far more valuable to those who DO get endorsement. Scarcity adds value. For us to reverse that would be a major about face and I am not sure there's significant money out there to replace the program we currently have.

I think raffling donated items (or simply selling them outright) is one possible thing. I also have thought about trying the One Red Paperclip method to trade up to something I'd like for myself (not JPF related.. actually a painting I'd like to get from an artist I admire but could never afford myself). So I will likely save that idea for that.

And Heidi, can I just have the showgirls over to my office for some dancing? Who needs a server.. bring on the showgirls! hahahaha.

Brian

$5000 eh?

And there are around 500 regular members here with 40,000 odd all up?

That equates to 500 cd sales at $10 a cd...

Gosh. Where would we find enough great original (donated) songs to fill a cd to sell to all the JPF members and their mates at $10 bucks a shot?

Brian,

Would Hostbaby be providing what is called a COLO, i.e., co-locating this new server in their data center and then you would contract with them for support; or would you have to create and manage your own DNS, bandwidth, firewall, anti-virus, etc.? (and turn it into www.jpfolks.net). Someone still has to manage the server and keep it updated with security patches, etc.

The COLO option with a support contract would minimize the amount of technical expertise you or a volunteer would have to provide. I presume that the benefits are primarily dedicated CPU availability and disk i/o?

Just make sure that BANDWIDTH isn't the bottleneck, but that it really IS CPU and disk i/o. Moving to dedicated hardware won't improve the bandwidth to the hosting facility (even if they have an OC48 or OC96, it can get completely saturated with enough traffic). Also, are there any upgrades at hostbaby to a higher-performance system? I'm hoping that there would be different "classes" of service available, no? Perhaps they can offer you a server with fewer websites (or lower-usage websites) on it to improve performance?

One downside to purchasing your own hardware is that there is no redundancy or failover capability unless you provide for that. Highest-availability-storage should be SAN-based, although for smaller storage requirements a dedicated RAID system will probably be fine. In a commercial, high availability data center, servers can also be clustered for failover abilities. Normally, using a commercial hosting company gives you all of the above or at least some options based on the above. I don't know hostbaby's infrastructure or data center architecture, but typically commercial facilities do provide various levels of redundancy and often can provide more than one level of system performance.

Feel free to PM or email me about this. As you can probably tell, I have more than a little experience in this area (data center architecture and network design). I also have friends who know a LOT more than I do on the technical side.

Right now the JPF site is hosted by Hostbaby, which is CD Baby's musician hosting site. We're on a server with 120 other sites and we're a big resource hog on it. Our site lately has been crashing (anyone get those error messages? that's the server maxing out). Ryan, who runs Hostbaby and takes care of our site on that end suggested we get our own server (if we could find the money) so that we would have our own resources and not have to share them with other sites. Normally they'd charge to host/switch it over etc.. but they're community partners with us and they'll handle the switch over and continue to deal with everything on their end. We'd ship the server to them and they'd install it and it would be hosted at jpfolks.hostbaby.com (whatever that means). I think having one with built in redundant back up and room for us to store a lot more stuff than we can now (we're a bit cramped for space on that server).

Today is the first day this idea came up. I haven't really investigated what is possible, what the benefits would be and what brand we should look into. But I know we'd have to raise some money no matter what and so I thought I would throw it out there. If folks are excited about being able to post songs on the boards directly, for example, or photos or whatever, maybe there's interest in raising some money for it to improve the site. We could post videos and all sorts of stuff with extra space.

Brian

Brian,
How many showgirls do you want? LOL!

Heidi

Boy I wish I was in a better place physically and financially. Both are a disaster. If I had it I would buy an entire new site for us myself. But I still love this one.

Some small suggestions!

1-At the top of this thread post the exact mailing/address info for anyone to send a
donation. Makes it way easier to donate. Our search engines take too long Don't make anybody look for anything, Impulse!

2- Lets maybe take the JPF theme song that I mixed and make it available for download purchase somewhere. That may raise a couple of dollars. Also we could run CD duplications with a nice label and sell a hard copy as well. If I had the dupication equipment I would have offered it already but I don't and we don't want to invest too much $ into something when trying to raise money soooo.
The download would be the best idea I think.

If 1/4 the members of JPF downloaded "All In This Together" for $1.00 each you would have $10,000 dollars pal Problem solved! lol... But really even if a few hundred download it. With you writers permission of course.. Heck it's our only theme song right now, it should be part of supporting it's own subject matter..

Brian,

Well, i certainly can't buy you a new site. But, I can spend a few dollars here. As I have mentioned on another post, there are times when you "make" yourself afford some things. JPF has given many people, myself included, opportunities that aren't easily available anywhere else that I know of. Also, when Helen went into a wheelchair a couple of years back, Tampa Stan (Stan Good), started a fund raiser that resulted in Helen having a nice powered wheelchair. The least we can do is throw in ten or twenty bucks. That wouldn't kill us. We can skip our once a month Trip to "Steak-n-Shake". But, you thoughtful consideration is much appreciated.

Al

Hey, I'm in for a donation if you decide to go for it....

I'm not sure I see it from a value-added perspective though. There are too many places that allow people to store music, photographs, blogs, videos, etc, for free. It's easy enough to link to them here. I don't see a compelling advantage to having everything on your server.

Or to put it another way: If you had $5000 to spend and your goal was to get more members to interact here, is buying a server the best way to do it?

I'm no computer expert. But 2 gig of RAM? Seems small if you plan to store music files.

You certainly have a better feel than anyone though about what direction to go - and, as I said above, I'm in if you do it.

Scott

2 gig of ram.. not hard drive space.. most of the ones I checked out had 2 72 gig hard drives. Right now this whole site is on about 4 gig.. (even though we have over 100K pages plus the 600+ posts on the boards).

And thanks Al and Mike. I am still looking into all this. I don't want to collect any money unless we decide we're definitely going forward. We're early in the process. I've thought about selling the theme song or offering it up for donations of any amount. I still consider it a demo and I'm hoping to one day to the vocals as we wanted (with the backing choir and the individual artists doing lines). We'll get there one day.

Brian

Except save you the hassle of dealing with tons and tons MP3 files. I am using up about 350-400 MB of soundclick space myself. You start hosting files and one server is not going to be enough to handle the storage or the bandwidth.

Kevin

Yep, agree there Kevin, may as well use the free service, and not bother with storage. I would hate to think of the bandwidth involved in hosting streaming music/video files, not to say the expense. Brian, put me down for a paid download, or a direct donation of a few dollars, or whatever is decided as the best way to easily generate the funds required.

cheers, niteshift

Money is always scarce but I have lots of CD that are already paid for and have sold enough for me to recover my cost. If you have some way to sell them, I could send you a mixed case to sell for whatever price you deemed fair. This way members or whom ever could donate to the cause and get a sample of my songs.

http://www.thehungersite.com/clickToGive/home.faces?siteId=1

Maybe something like what that site does for hunger, can be done for JPF. (NOT that the need for songwriters and such is on the same level as needs for the hungry, of course.

I'm just talking about setting up a designated site like that, where all the companies accepted and are willing to participate, would contribute (X amount of cents or whatever), to JPF, in return for their ad links, for every hit, (once per day that one would only be allowed to do).

I go to that site every day and just click the give link. I don't give money, but the ad sponsers pay for one cup of food for that one click).

????

Details of how they monitor one click per day from any given computer is beyond me. But if they do it, it's being done!

John

I don't want to get into a "click this banner" game. Ack. = )

I still haven't had a chance to consult with anyone on our end about the benefits and features and costs. It does seem clear, at least from the vocal among you, that you have no need or interest in us hosting your songs.

Brian

I like the site as is now,,,,,This was NEW not that long ago. Big upgrade as is! Maybe stay in this house for five years and see how things are. ???

Like for drums in a lot of genres, most times less is more.

John,

We're talking about the website, not the just the message boards. Remember, the boards are one section of the website. Have you looked around at the rest of it? It needs a lot of updates and the tech we use on it is ancient and outdated.

Brian

Brian, that's where I would put the focus, on the tech issues eg the search engine, and other identifiable areas of improvement. To host songs here would be great, but using up resources which could be better placed elswhere. As they say, "Why buy the cow if you get the milk for free "

cheers, niteshift

I agree with most of the others: I don't really want yet another place to upload my songs. I have my own domain/site, I have myspace, and I suppose I could use CDBaby and/or Soundclick if I needed more.

Just a thought: For an investment significantly less than that for a new server, you could get a really good web site designer to revamp the rest of the JPF site content and modernize the look.

hi Brian

place a donate link on every page on jpf
like Steve Pavlina does
http://www.stevepavlina.com/donate.htm

read and implement
How to Make money from your blog
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/05/how-to-make-money-from-your-blog/

begin affilliate programs
with many quality companies like

CDBaby http://cdbaby.biz/

Google Adsense https://www.google.com/adsense/

clickbank.com

amazon.com

there's many others

place them on every jpf page and in the newsletters

if you're friends with jodi at musesmuse
she seems real up on that stuff

also my buddy marc gunn has written some nice articles on the topic
http://www.bardscrier.com/articles/

like
Passive Income for Musicians - My Top Music Affiliate Programs
http://www.bardscrier.com/musicbiz/2004/10/passive-income-for-musicians-my-top.shtml

hope this helps,

Ande

I don't think people have a problem with you referring them to quality products and services that can truly help them

would you be willing to refer people to CDbaby?
would you be willing to provide links
where folks can hear jpf winners and finalists at CDBaby?
IE
The winner of JPF's 2006 song contest was
Cheley Tackett's with
"Play the One I Like"
It's the 2nd track on her "HERE" Cd
you can hear it at:
http://cdbaby.com/cd/tackett2/from/ande
Cheley is an amazing artist drwaing many fans and critical acclaim.
here's her first CD
http://cdbaby.com/cd/tackett/from/ande

you wouldn't be telling people to "click here"
you'd just be offering links
then if they did check them out and make a purchase
you or jpf would be paid a commission

Instead of purchasing, I'd consider leasing from Rackspace or other big server farm. You can lease and upgrade as you need. Instead of $5,000, it would only require the monthly fee. I don't know exactly how it works but it's a monthly fee instead of lump sum and you actually do have your own physical server, shared with no one.

Brian,
I think I would pay some greenbacks to have a CD of all my posts going back over the years . As silly as it sounds , I don't really have the time or inclination to make the searches involved or learn the computereese required to put it onto a CD.
Rather than that , since that would require so much individual time to build CD's for each member/contributor , build some CD's that are the beginnings of JPF (doubtless CD Baby would want to punch 'em out for us) and as time and popularity allow more CD's comming forward in time all the time , so to speak.
Very Respectfully ,
Pete Larsen

The website redesign gets away from the fact that we're draining the server we're on and when it maxes it, our entire site slows to a crawl or shuts down like it did several times last week. Having our own server would mean we'd never have that problem.

Our own server would ALSO mean we could add new stuff because we'd have 100-200 times more space to expand the site itself. It would also mean we could add some sites (i.e. other domain names that we already own) which could cover new services under a different umbrella than JPF. That's attractive to some companies who want to do stuff with us outside of the context of JPF (meaning it wouldn't change JPF being free etc.)

Thanks for the continued feedback.

Brian

Brian,
I agree that running "fast & hard" into the ad game may NOT be the answer for this kind of organization, though it seems to work fine at places like SoundClick.

They have two programs:
a) Free unlimited music hosting for artists supported by artist promotions, music industry ads and some larger corporate sponsors.

b) Artists can pay $9.95 for a VIP account which gets rid of all the ads and banners from their page.

It would be interesting to find out what percentage of the 200,000 + artists and bands at SoundClick are paying $9.95 for the SoundClick VIP page. If we could find out how many (maybe a number are JPF members), then you'd have some valuable info to work with.

For example, if you provided a similar "VIP" service here, maybe you could offer a better deal, like for $5 or $6 per month. This might give some artists an incentive to switch over to save some money, while also supporting JPF at the same time!

Ok, it wouldn't provide the full "9 yards" like Hostbaby or Bandzoogle does (domain name support, 50 different skin options and dedicated email server), but at least it would be as good as what SoundClick has and probably better then what MySpace and PureVolume offer.

If you could get about 100 users (to start) at $6.00 per month, that would be $600.00 per month, and eventually you might get several hundred/s of these JPF/VIP members. That could add up to tens of thousands of dollars per year.

Regarding your $5,000 (estimated) equipment upgrade, would that be a one-time cost or would it also cost that much per year to keep it all running and maintained? That's why I'm wondering if maybe getting a fully-managed dedicated server might be a better solution. Then you'd pay only "x" per month and can more easily scale your growth (up or down) as needed. If that sounds like a good alternative, I could probably suggest some reputable server options for you to consider.

Michael

Michael,

I pay the $9.95 at Soundclick and feel that I am getting a very good deal. They now also have an embedded player that you can very easily place on any other website you might subscribe to or that you own. You know how tight money is for me with Helen's astrinomical medical costs. but, I feel that $9.95 is a minimal expense that I "make' myself afford.

Al

You can lease a server, but I think by the time he gets the hardware he wants, the lease fees would pay for a server outright in about two years. Plus, I looked around briefly, and I think most of the lease sites limit bandwidth/you pay extra if you go over. Plus, you have to be careful with lease companies. I am aware of some horror stories. He can trust Hostbaby. Musician's need tech stuff. Maybe Fry's would become a partner and donate/trade for advertising the hardware if someone would built it? Or donate/trade for advertising a completely built server? This site has to generate enough traffic to be worthwhile to the right people.

PS - anyone notice this site does not work well with Foxfire anymore?

Al,
Look at it this way...
Wouldn't you be happy to get the same service right here at JPF for (maybe) 40% less while also supporting JPF on a regular basis!

If Brian could get about 100 folks like you to commit to get this going, he'd be on his way. That would be at least $6,000 in the first 10 months, surely enough to support a new server and then keep it growing.

Just kicking some ideas around,
Michael

Michael,

Sure, I'd love to have a "Song Home" here at JPF. And I would have no qualm with paying the $9.95 to JPF. I was just replying to your comment to brian about wondering how many JPFers are paying over at Soundclick. I know of several besides myself. however, most of the JPFers over there are going with the free service.

Al

Im into donation.

Where to send it Brian?

Lynman

I'd like to.
But the only standards I know are originals around some early rock, metal, and alt covers, and samples from when I strated out as a synth freak. Don't do much standards or samples now. I do various pop/rock influences that I'm looking to brush up on more of the standards of. Eclectic and multi-genre in styles and moods.
I always thought that JPF should have an mp3 site here though.

I'm all for keeping this place ad free. And I far prefer straight donations to any fundraiser that incurs expenses and requires additional outlays over and above the money you need to raise.

How about just setting up a thread taking pledges (or allow folks to send in an anonymous pledge via e-mail and let Brian just keep adding them in)? Keep a running total on the thread until we meet the $5,000.

Brian,

I know I haven't been around much in the past few months, but I for one (though I'm sure I'm not the only one)feel that this site is a God send and is more than worthy of a donation on my part. You have created something here that we all appreciate more than we could say. It is invaluable to so many. This site gives encouragement to "newbies" and support and advice that we wouldn't otherwise get...sometimes this may be the ONLY place we get any encouragement and GOOD advice. To me...that is worthy of support in whatever way I can give it.

Whatever you decide to do, be it donation or membership upgrade fee...I'm there. The donation aspect may be a way to start and see how well that goes. If it's needed...then try another direction. I don't think you'd be too surprised by the outpour of support/donations you'd receive from the folks here if that were an option.


Bree

If I could host my songs here I would. I would Pay a monthly fee to do so.
Maybe two levels of membership.
Free- No music hosting
paid- music hosting

Actually I'd like to see a third level

Paid- to access the Lyric forums. I don't like the idea of non-members (anonymous) being able to read our lyrics.

I am with you Bill about a monthly fee. Divide the cost by the membership plus a little bit on for safety and that would be the fee.