Bandwidth costs
In the soon to be released Episode 10 of BASH I go on a RAMPAGE! over the high cost of bandwidth and how it affects gamers.
If you are a server administrator here in Canada or in the U.S., it is not uncommon to be paying close to $66.00 per month rent for a 24 player server and even that amount can be low if you exceed your bandwidth for the month.
Assuming that you have 24 players in your clan that comes to about $33/person per year! Assume that of the 24 only 1 in 4 are actively playing or financially supporting your clan that means the administrators will be footing almost 75% of the bill for everyone else's enjoyment. To come to a sustainable financial situation, again assuming that only 1 in 4 of your clan actually pays to play, you will need about 100 players in your clan!
Given that most clans have more than one server, the costs can be quite high. While being sympathetic to the average player who has incurred the high costs of even getting online - after all they have typically paid close to a thousand dollars for a computer, 30 to 50 bucks for the game and then about 40 to 50 bucks a month for high speed internet access, I must point out that the cost of their bandwidth seems more and more shouldered by the server administrators.
If you are a player, please help the administrators or your clan leaders with a donation. Nothing is too small. Using the example I gave, a $30 donation a year is about right in a large clan. But do the math yourself.
Factor the massive amount of time and effort it takes to run a website, coordinate all the players and keep everyone happy in a clan and you can factor that number easily by 10.
If you are in a clan, make some sort of contribution. Either through a donation or giving your time to ensure that the clan is a success. Remember one of the goals is to make the clan self-sustaining financially. Spread the word around and get more people into your clan who *will* support it financially. If it's self-supporting then it will be around for a long time.
Here at BASH we pay big bucks for bandwidth as well. In an attempt to lessen these very high bandwidth costs, we have had to institute AdSense which consists of fairly unobtrusive Google ads that appear on the right hand side of the screen when you log into our webcast server or our Blog.
We ask our readers and listeners to please help us out and it is very simple to do. Please just click on the ads posted on our webcast site at:
Or here on our blog (using the Google search engine also brings in revenue for us).
If you like the show or if we have in any way helped you out or entertained you please come to the blog or to the webcast site and simply click on the ads, or you can use the google search engine posted on our Blog site.
Clicking on the ads will contribute to keeping BASH on the internet.
It won't take you very much time and it makes a big difference to our bottom line every month. Please click and click often.
Everyone here at BASH thanks you very very much!
