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This is the old Tech Section article
Help Support the Club
Published by: danielblues , On: Aug-01-2003
Hi,
As some of you know, the Datsun 1200 Club is being hosted on the "Branco bros" home server thru our cable connection. That has served us well, but as the Club is getting bigger we are consuming more and more bandwidth, and when our ISP billed us $90 last month and $70 the month before, we had to start looking and working on a way to make the club self-sustained.
When the datsun1200.com adventure started we were paying for our network connection $35, then the bill escalated to the figures stated above, we are consuming more bandwidth in a day then on hole initial months!
So the decision was to move the club from our house to a dedicated server, on a well prepared data center. It provides a faster and more reliable serviçe for the club members with the current flat fee of $40 a month., that we gess it should be enougth for the next year if we continue to grow like this, the next step will be $75 a month.
(we still have to pay $35 for our net connctions, as every one else, and we will also be mirroring the new server on the old one as a backup)
To provide some income we went for the usual stuff, merchandise, donations and ads.
As we are an international club we couldnt handle the distribution so we've setup a Merchandise Store using Cafepress services.
Donations, well... it's a donation 
a nice way to say thanks to our efforts.
One of the reasons to leave the original yahoo club was the excessive advertisement, so we went for a low profile aproach that also helps the funding of the club.
We are also considering renting @datsun1200.com mail and web space, that the new more reliable server provides, more news on this soon.
The current(old) server also hosts more projects, the CIMO club, my orienteering and hiking club, Xoops portuguese support, a closed site for my friends and our open source efforts , Bluetopia - Open Source Software Engineering. , this was all done in a volunteer effort has this site was, so zero income.
We would like to develop and host new sites and open source software, and profit from this new solutions, but for the moment we dont have any source of income. Because the Datsun 1200 Club uses more than 95% of the resouces we had to start here.
Saying that, it's not our intention to make a profit out of the Club. All the raised money will be used to cover the club's hosting, DNS and merchandise store costs.
We will keep an open aproatch to this (and our daily jobs) but if it changes we will post it here.
After the moving, we are still setting things up, we be preparing some new stuff for th Clubs fifth aniversary, keep an eye out
Long live the Datsun 1200 Community!