What does MadIRC cost?

That hardware costs money is a normal thing in this world. And that we need hardware to run our software is something you are aware of, for sure. But what kind of hardware do we need and how much does it cost?

Right now, MadIRC has no own servers. We run on our oper’s servers. They sponsor the needed capacities and keep the network alive.

But this also makes us depending on them. In our history, we already had an oper who decided to no longer participate with us which required us to find a new server location as soon as possible. It went well, but we still depend on people’s good will.

So what would it cost to become completely independent?

We did a quick calculation:

Quantity	Name	Purpose	Price (Digital Ocean)	Price (Vultr)
3x	Host	Host the IRC, Webpage and services	$15/month ($5/month per droplet)	$15/month ($5/month per node)
3x 10GB	Persistent Storage	Store configuration and certificates	$3/month ($0.10/GB/month)	$3/month ($0.10/GB/month)
1x 20GB	Persistent Storage	Store Services and statistic Database	$2/month ($0.10/GB/month)	$2/month ($0.10/GB/month)
—	Sum	—	$20/month	$20/month

All in all, we have $20 per month for a completely independent IRC network running on 3 hosts.

It basically means when 20 Members spend $1 per month for MadIRC we can provide even more awesome and high available service!

Let’s see what would be the difference?

Services / Features	“Chaotic” ($0/month)	Dedicated ($20/month)
HA IRC setup	✔	✔
Tor Access	✔	✔
Webchat	✔	✔
Bounce Service	✔	✔
IRC Statistics	✔	✔
Mumble host	✔	✔
Mumble web interface	✔	✔
Tor Webchat	✔	✔
Status page	✔	✔
IRC with trusted certificates	✖	✔
HA Webchat	✖	✔
HA Tor Access	✖	✔
Load balanced bouncer service	✖	✔
Security audit for all nodes	✖	✔
Infrastructure documentation	✖	✔
Reproducible infrastructure	✖	✔

It’s up to you to improve MadIRC or not. Since we don’t know what you think about our idea to become more independent, we started a user poll and see what we should focus on in future.

Tell us what you think!