Howdy all. We've been on our new server for 3 months now. Everything seems to be working well. I've been monitoring our server usage, and we're in the green! So that's great news. Thanks everybody for your patience as I went through these severe growing pains. Naturally, when a little site like SSV begins to grow, things get more complicated and considerably more expensive. @Scrappile suggested a good idea in offering different levels of support for SSV patrons. So I thought I'd give it a try and see how it goes.
I have created 3 levels of support for SSV Patrons; Bronze, Silver, and Gold. The 3 levels offer the exact same benefits. The only difference is the supporter title and the color of the supporter badge below your avatar.
Bronze is $10/year and is the same one we've always had (still says SSV Patron).
Silver is $3/month (cost of a cup of good coffee).
Gold is $5/month (cost of a cup of fancy Starbucks coffee).
I'm using a new payment processor that can handle recurring payments. So these new subscriptions will auto-pay until you cancel it. So you don't have to worry about trying to remember to resubscribe. None of the credit card information is stored on my server and I don't have visibility into your information. Payments are processed by Stripe which is embedded into SSV.
You can upgrade and downgrade your plans at any time. Upgrades will charge the prorated difference between the two plans. Downgrades are also prorated with the difference given as account credit.
I'm going to give this a try for awhile. If it becomes more trouble than it's worth, I'll revert back to the old way. But if it does work, it is a nice way to pitch in a few extra bucks to cover the cost of running SSV.
If you're interested in becoming an SSV Patron, or you want to upgrade, you can find the new badges here.
Thank you everybody for your continued support! I really appreciate it.