About Retromags

Retromags is a 100% community supported site and project. What this means is that we rely on our members to assist us with getting things done around this site. We also may ask for donations from time to time to assist in paying for the daily costs of running such a cool project. Neither @E-Day nor @Phillyman collect a paycheck from Retromags. Both site admins have standard 9-5 jobs that we go to each day, we both also have wives and children that we come home to. This site is a hobby for both of us that we run in our spare time.

Costs of Running Retromags

When Retromags started out, we were on a shared hosting plan. This means that Retromags shared a web server with 50-100 other websites. This worked out well in the early years, because Retromags was still small in size. Back in 2006 all of our preserved magazines were on torrent sites. We struggled to find members that would seed these releases after getting to 100%. We brought the Retromags collection onto the shared server and for a few years this worked out. Unfortunately as the Retromags collection grew, so did the need for resources. Back in 2009 we were contacted by our web host and told to stop hosting files...or be shut down. We moved the Retromags collection to MegaUpload and for a while this kinda worked. In 2010 Retromags was thrown into chaos when the FBI shut down MegaUpload, we were given no warning and suddenly all of the links on Retromags were invalid.

After MegaUpload was shut down, we tried to regroup and move our collection to Rapidshare. Again we were blindsided when Rapidshare began to change their Terms of Service, and finally Rapidshare shut down as well. We then started to move the collection to FileFactory and tried to recover yet again. We were disappointed when we started seeing how FileFactory was handling our files. They started to use popups, multiple download buttons and dirty tricks to get users to click on their ads. At this point we were fed up with all these file hosting websites. We asked ourselves "Could Retromags afford a dedicated server?" Up to this point Retromags had always been on a shared hosting plan thru HostGator, BlueHost or Dreamhost. These shared hosting plans ran around $10-$20 per month ($120-$200 per year). If Retromags went to its own dedicated server we would be looking at a cost of $130-$200 per month ($1560-$2400 per year).

I spent a few months researching dedicated hosting providers and we had our cost of $150 per month ($1800 per year). What does our $150 per month buy us? It gets us....

• Intel Core i5-760 @ 2.8Ghz
  
• 4GB of RAM
  
• 2TB of Hard drive space
  
• 5TB of Bandwidth per month
  

In addition to our dedicated server, Retromags also pays the developers of this forum software. This additional cost provides us with support and updates to this software. We are able to upgrade to newer versions of this forum software and its components, it also provides us the ability to instantly create emergency tickets with the company that made this software and get us back online if anything should ever happen. We could have went with free forum software solutions out there, but none of them were as robust as this one. While we have no obligation to upgrade, we do so to keep your information secure. Many users will use the same email/password combination on multiple sites, and we strive to keep your information from falling into the wrong hands.

Next we have the cost of the magazines themselves. You can find tons of video game magazines on eBay to purchase. Rare publications and older magazines can get very expensive to acquire for preservation. You can easily pick up a random issue of Nintendo Power for $8 shipped, but the first issue of Nintendo Power now goes for $60 and higher! Do you want to get your hands on the first issue of Nintendo Fun Club or Team Sega Newsletter? Those issues regularly fetch a few hundred dollars. The first issue of P.S.X. magazine regularly shows up and sells for $400! Sometimes Retromags is contacted by a member that wishes to donate magazines to our site, but they don't want to pay for the shipping of those magazines. When you donate to Retromags and/or become a Patron, your monetary donations not only go towards hosting costs, but the costs to get magazines to us for preservation. We regularly get contacted by members outside of the USA that wish to send us magazines for preservation, but the costs to ship 20lbs of magazines from the United Kingdom to the USA is insanely expensive.

So when you donate or become a Patron...

• You help offset the $1800 for our dedicated server
  
• You help offset the $300 for our software upgrades and support
  
• You help offset the cost to buy missing magazines from eBay
  
• You help us cover the costs for members to ship their magazines to us for preservation.
  

Also as the Retromags collection grows, it is becoming increasingly harder for us to get backups of this site. Right now the entire Retromags site is about 140GB in size, and that is just too much to back up over a residential ISP. We have the option to snapshot Retromags, but you guessed it.....that is an additional cost. To just snapshot Retromags once per month is $0.25 per gig. That means if we snapshot just once per month, it would cost us $35 each time....or $420 per year.

So as you can see, running a project such as Retromags does cost money. While we could recoup some of the costs by running popups or advertisements, we think it would be tacky to cover our site in FanDuel, DraftKings and EHarmony adverts. As of right now our site has 5900+ members, and it only takes 90 of those members to donate $20 for us to cover the cost of our dedicated server for the year.