Hey All,

I'll get right down to the point without a long introduction to this: I'm going to have to shut down the current server. This isn't some kind of BS marketing tactic; I simply can't financially afford to keep things going at the rate it's going, even though I dearly love Toy Fort and the community that's built around it.

tl;dr version: I can't keep paying for this server on my own. Current server shutting down in a couple of weeks. If enough people donate, I'll set up a new server and we'll transition to it seamlessly. If not, then Toy Fort will be shut down.

Long version:
In the past 3 months, I've been paying for the server out of pocket, all the while hoping that community donations would pick up to take the financial burden solely off of myself. We started running off of the VPS that I used for webhosting, which I upgraded to a dedicated server so that we could support more players with less lag.

We've received 3 donations for the month of July totaling $36 (QTF2.com has the breakdown). I'm immensely grateful to the 3 folks who donated what they did and Im very happy that there were a few people willing to step up and help support the server that they love to play in.

Unfortunately, this level of donations isn't nearly enough to sustain the server, and I'm going to have to switch back to my VPS (from our current, dedicated server) on or around July 15th or so for financial reasons. If I keep Toy Fort running on that, it'll only support 16-18 people, and will be very laggy when full, because it'll be on a VPS. Whether I do that or not depends on the other constraints on the server and I can't guarantee that I will (though I want to because I love Toy Fort and the people who play here!)

The other option right now is for folks to start donating so that I can rent a dedicated server specifically for TF2. I priced out a few servers, and donations will need to be between $75-$100/month for this to be viable. I'm still going to go through with the current server shutdown simply because I can't afford to keep paying it on my own. If enough donations come in over the next 2 weeks, I'll rent a dedicated server that will only be used for TF2 (instead of being shared with my webserver) that will keep running as long as people donate.

In return for donations, I'll be assigning a limited number of reserved slots (~20-24 max is my expectation, maybe more depending on the maxplayers on the server) that you'll receive for a monthly donation amount of $5 or more. In the next few days I'll have some info up on how you can sign up for a reserved slot. When you sign up for a reserved slot, you'll get one on the current server for the remainder of this month, along with a spot reserved on the new server if/when it goes up.

As soon as 15 reserved slots are taken, I'll set up the new server and we'll transfer over to that immediately. If we don't get 15 reserved slots taken by the middle of July, then I'll refund anyone who's already donated for one and cancel the whole operation (including the 3 folks who already donated for July).

(The 3 folks already donated for July will get a reserved slot for the 1st month assuming we can keep this train rolling; I just need them to email me from the PayPal address they donated from and tell me their Steam ID.)

Message me on steam or email me at admin@qtf2.com if you're interested in getting started with a reserved slot or if you have any questions/comments. The more people who show an interest in actively contributing, the faster we can get set up on a new server.

-=Q=-