Hey everyone! So if you remember, from my last correspondence, we’ve recently branched out into anime. It’s been a great change thus far and has given us a little bit more to talk about. In this communique, I’ve got a few things I’d like to share with you.
The first thing is, the home page looks a little bit different. It was time to clean it up and give it a regular layer of polish. Pages look a little bit cleaner, content has been modified slightly, but as far as it stands, that’s the most of it. A lot of the changes this time were internal with the intention of making things smoother.
Now, I very much hate doing this, but the publication could use a little bit of help! See, it’s very costly to run a website as a full-time graduate student. Ideally, when I graduate next spring, things will start to look up as I actually get salaried, but in the meantime, running a website for as long as it’s been online has been relatively taxing. Thankfully, the doors this passion and side hobby have opened are huge, but even so, I’ll give you a breakdown of what I am talking about in terms of finances.
- Website hosting costs: $179.40/year
- Business license fee: $800/year
- Email accounts: $120/year
- CloudFlare CDN: $179.40
- Domain name renewals: $26/year
This is just website operation costs – and by that, I mean, this is what gets paid out each year just to keep the lights on. If I was looking to save money, I’d cut email accounts and CloudFlare, but then the site would be awfully slow and miserable to read. This does not yet account for attending expos (just add another $1,000 per expo) for the weeklong period, equipment costs, miscellaneous costs associated with things going wrong, research and development time, you name it.
So, the meat of it all is, websites are expensive! Because of that, you might start seeing a bit more ads on the site. They’ll rotate out frequently with different stuff in case it gets old after a while! If you’d like, you can contribute to those above costs with this handy little button here. I am not forcing anyone to donate, and please, do not donate money if you’re financially strained. I don’t want you to end up in debt or unable to pay your own expenses! Any penny does help, and if you’d like I can give you a shout out. Thank you all, always, for continuing to come back and read the site. It means the world.
