Portal Wiki:Donate

The Portal Wiki is currently hosted by Wind (Etienne Perot) on a virtual private server which costs quite a bit of money every month to keep running.

While there are no plans to discontinue hosting the Wiki in the foreseeable future, a donation still helps alleviate those monthly costs.

How can I donate?

You can make a donation using Flattr, PayPal, and Bitcoin.

Flattr donation

Flattr is a "social microdonation" payment system. Instructions:

Sign up for Flattr, if you haven't done so already.
Add some funds to your Flattr account using one of their numerous payment methods.
Click the Flattr button that appears at the bottom of the Portal Wiki's sidebar, or use the widget below.

Important note regarding direct Flattr donations: On top of providing recurring micropayments, Flattr also has a direct donation feature. However, as of this writing, this feature can only be used to donate money to people, not to things.

As such, any direct Flattr donations will be treated as a personal donation (to be spent towards the Portal Wiki or not), unless otherwise specified by emailing WindPower.

Please also note that all donations are aggregated. It is therefore impossible to tell who is donating what. If you would like to be properly credited in the donation history below, please email WindPower saying the amount of your donation, and the name you would like to be credited as.

If you would like your donation to still show up in the Donation History below but preserve your anonymity, you can register for a new Portal Wiki account through Tor using a non-identifying username, and write on WindPower's talk page. You do not need a verified email address.

PayPal donation

PayPal is a popular online payment processor.

You can donate to the Portal Wiki using the button below:

Gumroad

Gumroad is a slick, easy-to-use payment processor with relatively high processing fees (5% + $0.25), but at least it's not PayPal.

Bitcoin

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer digital currency. If you have Bitcoins that you would like to donate:

Sign up for Flattr (you can use an anonymous email account)
Send your Bitcoins to your Flattr account
Click the "Flattr" button on the left of the page

Google Checkout

Unfortunately, Google Checkout donations are only available to US-based 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations, which the Portal Wiki is not.

Amazon Payments

Unfortunately, Amazon Simple Pay Donations are only available to US-based 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations, which the Portal Wiki is not.

Details

Where does my money go?

Your money goes entirely towards paying hosting costs.

How much money does hosting cost every month?

The Portal Wiki is hosted on a Linode 2GB, which as of this writing costs $40.00 (convert to euros) per month. The Linode is paid for yearly, which gets a 10% discount, meaning that the actual cost is $36.00 per month (convert to euros).

Note that the Linode does more than hosting the Portal Wiki. As such, it would be unfair to say that the Portal Wiki alone costs this amount of money to run. Here is some (admittedly rough, so that they don't have to be continuously updated) relative figures on how much the Portal Wiki uses:

50% of the allocated storage space
60% of the outgoing bandwidth used by the Linode per month on average (incoming bandwidth is free)
37% of the maximum allocated memory usage (this includes nginx, php-fpm, mysqld, WindBOT, crushfs, and RCNotify.py)

What happens if donations are higher than the monthly hosting cost?

The donations are not expected to fully cover hosting expenses. In the event that they do, the extra money will be saved and, at the time of the yearly hosting package renewal, be used to purchase a better Linode plan for the server if the extra money allows it.

What do I get for donating?

A fuzzy, warm feeling, and our gratitude. It is not possible to offer benefits such as "no advertisements", because the Portal Wiki has no advertisements.

Anything else?

Additionally, the Portal Wiki uses two domains (theportalwiki.com for content, and theportalwiki.net for cookie-less, cheaper-bandwidth CDN), each costing $10.69 per year, plus the Whois privacy feature for $2.88 per year each, totalling $27.14 (convert to euros) per year in domain registration fees.

The donation methods described on this page do not go towards those fees. If you would like to help with them, please contact Moussekateer.

Donation history

If you don't want your donation to be public, please email WindPower saying so prior to making your donation.

Month	Donations	Donations total	Server cost	Rest paid by WindPower
April 2011 — April 2012	N/A	0.00	323.52	323.52
May 2012	RJackson: 5.60	5.60	26.96	21.36
June 2012	i-ghost: 94.41 RJackson: 5.60 Anonymous: 63.31	163.32	26.96	0.00
July 2012	RJackson: 5.50	5.50	26.96	0.00
August 2012	RJackson: 5.67	5.67	26.96	0.00
September 2012	RJackson: 5.77	5.77	26.96	0.00
October 2012	None	0.00	26.96	0.00
November 2012	MogDog: 5.23 Wormhole: 5.81 Anonymous: 0.27	11.04	35.96	0.00
December 2012	Wormhole: 5.87	5.87	35.96	9.28
January 2013	Lagg: 9.43 Moussekateer: 30.56 Wormhole: 6.11	46.10	35.96	0.00
February 2013	Wormhole: 5.86	5.86	35.96	19.96
March 2013	Wormhole: 5.78	5.78	35.96	30.18
April 2013	None	0.00	35.96	35.96
May 2013	None	0.00	35.96	35.96

All monetary amounts are in U.S. dollars, converted from their currency of origin according to their exchange rate at the end of the corresponding month. Transaction fees are not included in the amounts shown, meaning that those numbers do not represent the amount donators have paid, but only the usable portion of it.