Happy Birthday SoylentNews PBC! Server Storage Upgrade, Folding, *and* Start of New Funding Period
martyb writes:
Milestone:
I doubt many people noticed, but yesterday (2021-07-04) marked a significant milestone in SoylentNews' history:
Our Independence Day: We're Officially Incorporated!
I'm pleased to announce that as of today, our articles of incorporation have been accepted and signed off by the State of Delaware, and "SoylentNews PBC" is a licensed public benefit corporation, ready to accept business, effective today.
[...] I feel that its fitting to post this today on July 4th, Independence Day, given the mission and unique history of SN.
This transformed us from a collection of like-minded nerds into an official entity and which made it possible for us to (finally!) accept funding for the site! Yes, there have been some hiccups along the way, but this was a key step in giving us a solid foundation from which we could proceed.
Server Upgrade:
It is with pleasure that I can announce that one of our database front-ends, fluorine was updated on 2021-07-02. We had been running with 96 GB of storage. On this date, with @Juggs: (aka Deucalion) watching over things, I snapped a quick ad-hoc backup and @mechanicjay: pulled the trigger to upgrade us to 160 GB of storage!
It's not that we were pressed for space. Linode (our web hosting provider) had made a free storage upgrade available to us quite a while ago. We held off for reasons I do not entirely understand except for the classic: "If it's not broke, don't fix it!". Whatever the reason, that wait is over! MJ assured us that the site would stay up (our other front-end hydrogen would carry the load) without any issues. So, with some crossed fingers, the button was pushed, fluorine was taken down, its disk was upgraded, and the server was restarted... with nary a hiccup!
It was suggested that maybe this was not worthy of mention, but we strive to be open with the community. I felt it was critically important we keep the community informed as to our activities, so here we are!
Folding@Home:
Still plugging away, the SoylentNews Folding@Home (F@H) team is still plugging along. Facing competition from the likes of Microsoft Azure, Google, IBM, Oracle, and other huge multinationals, it is a great pleasure to announce our current status.
We are still ranked within the top 400 teams in the world - at last check, we have earned over 2 billion points!
New Funding Period:
According to my estimates, we missed our $3,500.00 funding goal by just 44 . There were some additional subscriptions that came in after midnight UTC[*]. Since then, we have already received $211.69 (6.0%) of our $3,500.00 goal for the next half.
[*] Where to draw the line? I am not a CPA, and these amounts are all unofficial estimates, so for our purposes here I'm using Midnight UTC as the cutoff.)
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.