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sword134:

--- Quote from: MrPresident on April 06, 2016, 03:03:59 PM ---The thing is...

Large servers need to have dedicated hardware. Using shared hosts (the ones that charge you per slot) is certainly cheaper and makes running a server affordable but it's not viable for a large community or a large server.

Dedicated servers cost money.. a lot of money.
I pay $136 per month for my dedicated server, which I can run multiple game servers as well as a web server on.

I could never afford to run the server without a donation model, and so that's what I do.




All of that being said... my donation model doesn't give players anything that can't be obtained by non-donating members. Most of the things are cosmetic.

In my experience (which is about 10 years of running gmod servers) players will donate simply to stand out above their peers. you don't need to give them an advantage, just give them something that non-donors can't get.

Player models, hats, skins, a fancy colored name in chat... these are the things people eat up.



...continued...

As for ads... forcing ads on players will only drive them away. There is nothing more annoying. 10 times out of 10 I would disconnect from a server that displayed me ads.
And, unless you are experiencing hundreds to thousands of hits per day on a website, don't expect to make any ad money there either.

Also.... in case you've never worked with ads before (I have) you don't really make money off just displaying ads.. only if the user clicks through it and even then.. it's not much.
Ad based revenue is really only viable for very large websites with lots and lots of traffic.

You'll make a couple dollars a month.. maybe..
Also.. (I feel like I'm rambling, I just want to save you from the negative experiences I've had) I believe with google Adsense, you can't even withdraw the money until you've earned a certain amount.. ~$100-200.


In conclusion: You're better off sticking to a donator model like everyone else if you want to support your server through money that isn't coming from your own pockets. What can set you apart from the 'greedy' servers is what you offer (or don't offer) donators.

--- End quote ---

I have tried ads on a gmod server before and it was recieved ok and actually made money enough. With a big enough playerbase the ads can pay for the server. I also had the idea of a chat tag that says Donator or something fancy like that, but thats about what the only thing you get when donating.

roastchicken:
I agree with Mr. President here. No-perk donations rely on generous people, and unfortunately the Garry's Mod community doesn't have many of those. I also hate servers that have a pay-to-win mentality and give donators huge benefits, but it's simply not practical to run a server on ad revenue and the occasional goodwill donation alone.

Having donators be able to buy items that don't effect gameplay (rank tags, playermodels, PAC3 or pointshop items, etc.) is a good way to get donations while still keep a fair server.

Another idea that I've had (although I've never tested it and I'm not sure how fair it would be in practice) is to have a set of time-based ranks with perks, and players have the option to donate instead of play on the server to earn those ranks.

However one thing that I have to disagree with Mr. President on is the cost. I ran (technically still do) a server that regularly had (maybe still has, I'm not sure) a peak of 20+ players daily. The server rarely experienced any lag*, only when players deliberately tried to lag it by way of piling a bunch of weapons on top of each other. This server ran on a VPS that cost me $5/month.

Server hosts that specifically sell Garry's Mod Servers (charge per slot) are usually a ripoff. Last time I checked, NFO charged $17/month for a 20 slot server. While they might be running better hardware than my $5 VPS, it's certainly not that much higher quality as to justify the $15 price hike. Even if it was, why bother when a cheaper server can run 20 slots just fine.

To start out with all you really need is a small (<20 slot) server, not a dedicated beast that can run multiple servers. I strongly encourage you to host your server on a VPS. Sure, it might be a bit difficult if you aren't very technically oriented. But it's definitely worth it for the cost and just a better understanding of how your server works so you don't need to rely on third parties such as a Garry's Mod Server Host's support team. There are plenty of online resources for learning, for example there is a pretty good tutorial on the wiki and if you host with Vultr (my server's host) they have their own guide for running a Garry's Mod Server on their VPS.

Anyways, that's it for my rant. I wish you the best of luck in your endeavors, and I hope you take our recommendations into account.

* I think it's important to point out that I was running a jailbreak server, and I assume DarkRP servers are more resource expensive due to all the props and just the usual larger nature of DarkRP servers. So maybe you might only be able to get 10 slots on a $5 server, but I'm no expert so I suggest starting out with a $5 server and upgrading if you need to.

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