Now, with the expansion of asfr.net, the Community Gallery, the Master List and more, the TrueNAS server is under a bit more pressure to serve files. The way the Community Gallery, along with the Master List works, any of the publicly viewable images and videos are actually hosted on the same server that runs the FTP, in other words, on my private server at my house.
Some of you may know the drive issues that this server has had. One of those drives is actually still in use with its 8 bad sectors, but the bad sectors are not spreading, which means it was more than likely a "head crash" onto the spinning platter rather than dust getting inside. The fact is though, some of those drives are getting on for 10 years old, and they will need to be slowly phased out.
Also, there is the internet connection that's serving it all. 1 Gb asymmetrical fibre, which means it's 1 Gb download and 1 Gb upload. It's the upload speed that serves the files going out of the server. With the server now hosting all the major files, that internet connection may become a choke point in the future, but as of right now, it's working fine.
The plan for supporting all of this is a simple one, Patreon and Payoneer. Patreon for the monthly regular donation, and Payoneer (a Paypal alternative) for one-off donations.
The way I am working it out right now, the regular monthly donations will be low...around £5 (about $6.50) a month. There will be a limited (around 5 to 8) "Creator" tier donation slots. That creator tier slot will be £15 (around $19) a month and will include 300GB of private FTP hosting space. For the Patreon side of things, I am going to run with the idea of a weekly Stable Diffusion Lesson, as an extra thank you to the people donating to keep everything up and running.
If the donations get to around £50 a month, that's the internet paid for; anything above that will be saved up to slowly replace the drives with current-generation 8TB drives.
The Patreon and Payoneer pages will be opening up before the end of the year; I want to get the Gallery and Media Database all up and running first!
