Hello there! It's @ddrfr33k, got some more updates. If you missed our last post, I recommend you do so. That'll get you up to speed on what happened and why we've been offline. It'll make a lot more sense when you see the next bits.
So, @chiren got some good news from Amazon support...
They're going to refund us our money!
But they're not refunding all of it. Turns out there were additional charges tacked on. Bumped us up from the $54,635.56 USD that we had incurred on the 23rd of August, all the way up past $123,500 USD. They're only refunding that first number.
Leaving us to foot the bill on the rest. They told us that on Halloween. We followed up, countered with "no, we're not paying that. You're still charging us for stuff that we can't afford and shouldn't be liable for." We pointed out the Rapid Reset attack from August. We showed them Google's documentation on it, Cloudflare's documentation on it, and just to throw some shade at them, we threw their own support portal page about it. They haven't responded...
So we're moving on. That's where we need your help! We're going to set up a proposal to cover the costs of a new server. We've got things lined up where we can set up the server, deploy the database we had, and then go live. It'll be a trivial affair. The only challenge? We need money. Because we're broke at the moment! Thankfully, I have a solution!
We're setting up a DHF proposal to cover the costs of the first couple months of operation. This will help us get back on our feet and get positive cash flow going again. This post will be used for that proposal. So if you can upvote this post and the proposal when it goes live, both @chiren and I would really appreciate it! Our monthly costs for the new server will be roughly $350USD per month, not including other services/fees. Our monthly costs are usually around $500/month, and we usually take in about that much as well. This is why making posts on the Hive blockchain is so important when you stream on Vimm! That's what helps us keep the lights on.
So we're going to shoot for around 2-3 months worth of funds from the DHF to cover our startup costs. It's going to be one ingest server for the time being, until we can get on our feet again. Old VODs are likely not going to be recoverable, as they were on our AWS storage. I'm really sorry, but this is due to factors outside of our control. If Amazon finally refunds our accounts, we would be able to recover the VODs and make them available again. We'll cross that bridge when we get there.
But yeah, go vote for the proposal. That's going to get us the funds we need to get back up and running. I want to thank everyone for their patience with this. This has been...frustrating...to say the least. But we're almost out of the tunnel! I can see the light!