It's Time for our Second Quarter FReepathon - Thread 3

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[Mo1]

It's Time for our Second Quarter FReepathon - Thread 3

Posted on 04/07/2003 6:33 PM EDT by Jim Robinson

Howdy everyone,

Are you ready for another FReepathon?

Good news:

John and Tami negotiated a new contract with our bandwidth supplier and got our bill lowered a couple thousand per month! Our monthly expenses are now totalling just under $20,000, so we're setting the target for this Freepathon at $60,000. We have approximately $18,000 (and growing) per quarter coming from our monthly donors so we will only need to raise a little over $40,000 this time. Hopefully, we can do this in a week to ten days.

We went over the goal last quarter and we used part of the extra money to purchase and install two new servers. We now have a total of five servers running Free Republic. John can post the details, but basically, we have two servers being used as web servers, two as database servers and one for the search engine. There may be some sharing and overlapping of duties, but that's the general configuration.

John also found a way to compress the files before serving them so we are able to effectively move 20mbs of data through our 10mbs line. In other words, we've doubled our capacity and halved our bandwidth cost!

Way to go John and Tami!!

(Just in time too! We hit the 10mps X 2 capacity a few times during the peak periods of the last couple of weeks).

And finally, we've added two new high capacity disk drives (I believe they're 72 gigabytes each) and just as soon as John gets the upload and file management programs ready to go, we'll be able to offer our donors directory space on their accounts to upload pictures, graphics, and music files, etc. I believe this is going to be a very popular feature!

Looking forward to another great fundraiser!

Thank you all very much for your continuing support and dedication to the cause!

Jim

[Jim Robinson]

Thank you, RottiBiz.

Last report for the night:

$20 from Oregon
$10 monthly from Virginia
$20 from Virginia
$20 from Ohio
$20 from Washington

Thank you all very much and to all a goodnight.

[RobFromGa]

Way to go Freepers, another quarter funded!!!

[RottiBiz]

Thanks for being a longtime monthly donor, Libertina!

You've been on the list since December 2001, 19 lines down from the top, left side.

Your continued support is very much appreciated.

[RottiBiz]

Thank you FReepers from:

Oregon!
Virginia (2)!
Ohio!
Washington!

Your support of Free Republic is very much appreciated.

[glock rocks]

good morning Rotti

[glock rocks]

Last report for the night:

$20 from Oregon
$10 monthly from Virginia
$20 from Virginia
$20 from Ohio
$20 from Washington

Thank you all very much
and to all a goodnight.

[EdReform]

Good Morning!

[RottiBiz]

Good morning, Glock!

Love your sunrise photos.

Here's some more for your special Thank You's

Eight days! That's a good record, considering there's a war on.

You've done a great job!

[glock rocks]

good morning.

we've collected a couple new threads to add to the bumps for freepathons. you did a great job keeping the (now) classic threads bumped (i.e. Grampa Dave's), as well as a few wonderful unsolicited threads that helped... and MonroeDNA's thread, etc.... they could have been lost if you hadn't built your linked posts.

good stuff, and it's working!

bravo zulo, my friend.

[glock rocks]

but... but...

was it fun?

[EdReform]

Thanks! And Good Morning!

Here's a gift for you:

[Fiddlstix]

Good Morning Everybody.

You Know The Drill
Click the Pics J

Coffee & Donuts J

[RottiBiz]

It will be when we can get enough monthlies to shorten the duration.

There are lots of other things I really like to do.

Blockbuster thinks I'm dead!

[glock rocks]

good morning Fiddlstix :o)

[RottiBiz]

Good morning, Ed.

Well, we did reach $7,000 per month for the monthlies!

You did an outstanding job with all your posts, links and bumps.

[EdReform]

Thanks Fiddlstix!

And Good Morning!!

[glock rocks]

yah, i agree with you there... it's slowly getting better.

we need to continue attracting new monthlies.

your lists are a motivating factor... that's why i'm a monthly donor instead of quarterly. you've done yeoman work with them. thanks.

now then... time to do the things we've been putting off!

myself... i gotta scan some rottie pics for a friend :o)

[EdReform]

Thanks glock! It's been a team effort - I've really learned alot from you guys! With all the new FReepers and Lurkers coming to FR, I believe it important to keep those older articles, quotes, etc bumped.

You're right - we do have a good collection of Ads, quotes, and articles. Do you folks think we should start having a short planning meeting a week or so before FReepathons to discuss the organization of ads to be fed to the android? I ended up pulling some of my older ads because I wasn't sure if they were effective any more (and some of the links contained within them were outdated).

For example, I really liked the way justshe turned grammymoon's "What would you do Without Free Republic?" post into an ad. That was excellent! Those are the kinds of ideas we could talk about in a short on line meeting (or perhaps we could just post the ideas to a thread in the Ways and Means forum).

Anyway, I do want to rework some of my old material, and I'd appreciate your ideas!

[EdReform]

Thanks Rotti! It was great seeing the monthly total go over $7K! I think Grampa Dave deserves a heap of thanks for focusing on monthly donors. It was his "5,000 Freepers who care are needed now" thread that really helped us increase the number of monthly donors.

And you, too, with all your hard work maintaining and posting the monthly and Dollar-A-Day lists and more recently the Donor Scoreboard and monthly summaries! I really appreciate you taking the time to do all that, and I always look forward to you posting the information.

So

Thank You RottiBiz!!

Thank You Grampa Dave!!

[RottiBiz]

Great idea, Ed!

It would be very helpful if everyone could share their ideas on how we can make the FReepathons better.

It would also help if we had a few days notice before the fundraisers start.