Is it possible to have such higher server cost?

[TONiC]

how can you stop invite selling by closing donations, unless you sell an invite with a donation and thats the only way to get one(and is that ethical in itself?).

If a tracker receives 100% of donations by say the 12th [day of the month], and donations close then, then no more invites can be bought. However, would this fuel invite sellers to donate earlier, and in larger quantities? Possibly yes (seeing as they know after a certain point they wont be able to buy an invite to later sell), but is this a bad thing? [In my mind yes, but...] Depends: They [invite sellers] may now guarantee a tracker reaches it's monthly goal, but fueled by someone selling access to your website. Soz, was just a blurb in my tiring mind, ignore it or take note of it...

That new album, that new game, that new app, that new pack

Would simply never have originated if someone wasn't motivated to go outside, buy the album, rip it, and selflessly give it away, possibly risking their career. It's off of these hard working people's backs that other seek to profit.

[stoi]

hmm

1: I have never once offered an invite for donation and never ever will.

2: We dont have invites or referrals since we took the fake page away.

3: When we did have them not many used them, and the majority (not all) that did didnt care about them, they still brought crap in.

4: In the lat few months, we have got in

2011-03 542
2011-02 1097
2011-01 1758
2010-12 1913
2010-11 2929
2010-10 1450
2010-09 1620
2010-08 5719
2010-07 351
2010-06 621
2010-05 775
2010-04 340

the 2010-08 was when we took the fake page off, the months before that are referrals (and we gave out 100,000+ in those months)

i still dont know what you are trying to say though. sell invites, dont care if members than sell them for a profit, just as long you close donations early when you reach cost, dont sell invites, be ethical in what you do, but you are shitstorms and dont trust you if you dont stop donations when you reach the cost.

really fucking strange way of looking at things lol.

[TONiC]

1: I have never once offered an invite for donation and never ever will.

This bro this! This is what I'm on about! Decent ethics... don't tell me, tell your 40,000 strong community!

[Pwner101]

Since stoi seems to be the only one commenting here I decided to chime in...

Q. Why r site admins so unwilling to disclose their server spec and exact cost and their host they are using ?

Core2duo with 2 gigs ram = $130 monthly.
(There are other monthly costs as well besides this.)
Put it this way... my site is much smaller than stoi's but we have other things we use donations to cover that his site probably would have no use for... every site is different and has different needs.. We spend roughly $300 a month.
Of this $300 a month if 60% comes from donations were lucky.
You can come up with your own assumptions of where the rest comes from....
(Our donation bar at 100% really is the amount we spend monthly. No extra funds are set aside for rainy day, buying sports cars, or hiring strippers..)
Note: The bar is cached and upon donating the bar shows the adjustment in about an hour of any donations.

Here's my thoughts on the subject of donations... if someone doesn't want to donate to a site simply don't.
I personally consider my site a hobby.
For as long as I have been running sites... I have never made a penny off any.

I use the same host as stoi and bitmetv.
(I won't say who for the same reason as stoi.)
Finding out who hosts are... is pretty easy doing a simple whois and getting the ip address of the server.

As for why we pay more to use this host... than we could elsewhere.
Location, Who it is hosting it, the uptime is great as well.
Up until a power outage maybe 8 months ago... we had uptime somewhere in the 900+ days range.
Feel free to show me the stats of the uptimes from those spanish ovh boxes if they come anywhere close to even 30 days without any downtime.

@tonic...
Upon our bar reaching 100% the donate button auto goes away.
AKA you would have to manually enter the url for the donation page to donate.

There are sites that run honestly and openly... but are not willing to give exact details for obvious reasons like stoi said...
For obvious reasons.

My personal opinion... I would rather remove un-needed site features and not resort to continuously having to pm users for donations on a weekly basis like bitsoup does. (Note: They actually make profit.)

[shipwreck]

It's kinda funny to be honest. Users demand excellent uptimes and fast browsing of the site, high download speeds, fast pre-times / uploads of releases, good retention, high security / 'safety' of the site / location etc. etc., and all this for free, and yet demand total transparency, as if the siteops aren't risking enough already. It's their arse on the line folks, not yours, so donating ten bucks doesn't give you the right to know every single detail about the site, especially if that information can be used against the siteops in court. If you need that kind of transparency, start a tracker yourself.

I've always been against making profit of warez, and believe me I had a lot of opportunities to do so back in the days, but some of the demands here are ridiculous. I applaud all those siteops who agree with me and do this as a hobby, I applaud sites like A-HD that don't even take donations of any kind because they don't want it to be used against them one day (God forbid), but at the end of the day, it's their friggin' right to do with their site as they please. They take a substantial risk, it's their choice. Don't like it? Don't use it.

[merwais]

1200$ is nothing comparing to Torrentleech cost per month.

Torrentleech 6000 Euro/month.

If it was that easy to run a big tracker, every single person would open a tracker.
BWT deserve some donation. BWT is a great indian tracker.


As far as i know, it's very very hard to get donation from Indian dudes
BWT is doing his best to keep his tracker online.

[TONiC]

TorrentLeech has around 180,000 members (tracker updates every 30 mins) + runs its own 10gbit/s topsite [if it wants to be playing with the big boys, this isn't OVH hosted, but Im not sure]. I'd consider 6000E/month to be relatively cheap,but they are able to generate advertising revenue they get from adbrite, as well as partnerships with Travian and 888 [or partygaming, cant remember]