FA Begs for Hardware... Again...

[Conan]

With the appearance of the new "Donate Hardware" link in the footer, FA is once again begging people to donate new hardware (or rather, buy it off an Amazon wishlist) to replace "aging infrastructure (2007-2008 era systems)", which is odd because all of those systems were believed to be retired. My guess is they are still in use alongside the new stuff and he needs to find an excuse to justify building more servers.


This time around, Sean has loaded up his wishlist with six server chassis, 30 hard drives (8 of which are SSDs), 8 processors, and (of course) 256GB of RAM. The goal here appears to be to build four "app" servers and two new file servers.

This comes after Princess Piche has authorized what is believed to be the first "commercial" advertisement on FA, an ad for "Five Nights at Freddy's" which appears in the "big" ad area at the bottom of the page, which makes you wonder how much he undercharged the game's developer if he still has to beg his users to buy him stacks of RAM.


The total cost of his wishlist comes to about $13,621.05$15,894.51. "IT'S A FREE SITE!!!" indeed.

[JTfurry]

FYI that "commercial" is actually something Neer gave away to the dev for free...

https://twitter.com/Dragoneer/status/508069737905934336

[magus]

If anyone had any doubts about FA's primary use being a tool to enhance Piche's standing in ~the community~, we have Exhibit A right here.

[Conan]

FYI that "commercial" is actually something Neer gave away to the dev for free...

https://twitter.com/Dragoneer/status/508069737905934336

Does he have a fetish for giving away ad space or something? He does it so much that you have to wonder why he even has ads on the site to begin with. Clearly they're not there to make money.

I just....  Seriously?! FA can't afford to buy anything they "need", but he's giving away free ad space to someone selling a game? I can feel myself getting stupider just trying to figure out that logic.

EDIT:Five Nights at Freddy's consistently shows up in the first two pages of Steam's Indie Top Sellers list for me. Totally someone who needs free ad space.

[JTfurry]

Does he have a fetish for giving away ad space or something? He does it so much that you have to wonder why he even has ads on the site to begin with. Clearly they're not there to make money.

I just....  Seriously?! FA can't afford to buy anything they "need", but he's giving away free ad space to someone selling a game? I can feel myself getting stupider just trying to figure out that logic.

I was banging my head on the desk when I saw it.

This dev has earned a fuck tonne of money due to the popularity of the game, no reason for him to get free ad space at all.

There are lots of better more furry stuff out there that could do with free ad space, that is just stupid.


Last I heard there were 150+ ads on the site. If you calculate it at most that is $3000 a month, hosting wont be that much, looking at about a $1000 for a bit of a rack, where is this $2k going?
Why is that not used to buy the hardware they are "in need" of?

[Conan]

Does he have a fetish for giving away ad space or something? He does it so much that you have to wonder why he even has ads on the site to begin with. Clearly they're not there to make money.

I just....  Seriously?! FA can't afford to buy anything they "need", but he's giving away free ad space to someone selling a game? I can feel myself getting stupider just trying to figure out that logic.

I was banging my head on the desk when I saw it.

This dev has earned a fuck tonne of money due to the popularity of the game, no reason for him to get free ad space at all.

There are lots of better more furry stuff out there that could do with free ad space, that is just stupid.


Last I heard there were 150+ ads on the site. If you calculate it at most that is $3000 a month, hosting wont be that much, looking at about a $1000 for a bit of a rack, where is this $2k going?
Why is that not used to buy the hardware they are "in need" of?

Their hosting bill is at least $3k a month, at last check. They have had a full rack for several years, plus many bandwidth upgrades.

Keep in mind that a percentage of those ads were free, given away for a variety of reasons, none of which are nearly as stupid as "made a game I like". If there's 150 ads in the pool, I'd guess that something like 50 of them are the "Lifetime free ads" he's given away. I know I've seen ads for Sciggles floating around the rotation when I forget to turn adblock on. You can guarantee that those were free.

[JTfurry]

A whole rack for FA....?

[Conan]

A whole rack for FA....?

In 2010, they upgraded to the full cabinet from a 1/4 cabinet. At the time, they paid just under $2k a month for it and 250Mbps uplink. I know they've increased that quite a bit since then.

At the time they had something like 15U worth of equipment, in a 44U rack, and also thought you needed a full rack for 24/7 access (which was wrong). They would later go on to complain that they didn't have enough power for new servers, which was later upgraded as well, IIRC (When people say their stuff is overpowered, it's quite literally using too much power).