[theforum] DigitalOcean hosting payment & finances

[David Kaufman]

Hi all,

William, I've made a $25 "pre-payment" to the Digital Ocean account
from evolt's Paypal account. And I setup a calendar reminder for
myself to login each month (on or around the 15th) to check what's due
and pay it, so you don't have to continue footing the bill!  I see
your credit card is still listed as "the" payment method, so hopefully
if I do this regularly (check the balance due, and overpay it by a bit
on the 15th) your credit card won't normally get hit at all.  That's
the plan at least -- we'll see how it goes!

[ btw, you're right, it's kinda wonky that they can't just bill our
Paypal account the exact amount due each month.  And you can't even
pay any amount! You have to choose the payment amount from a drop down
listing some arbitrary increments (i.e. i can pay $10 but not $20 --
had to pay $25 lol) But actually SoftLayer had similar wonkiness
surrounding Paypal payments, so I'm sure it's Paypal that's to blame,
not them.  At SoftLayer I also had to remember to login to their
system manually each month to pay the invoice amount using Paypal, and
I had to do it *after* they issued the next month's invoice (turned
out to be around the 18th) but *before* the 1st, or else they'd send
me grumpy threatening overdue notices! ]

Fantastic that this looks to be less than half what we were paying
before (< $20 as opposed to $45) per month!

Finance-wise we currently have:

  $127.21 in the evolt PayPal account, and
  $433.56 in the PNC Bank checking account

(after the above PayPal payment)  There hasn't been much activity in
either, other than the slow steady trickle of $10 donations still
coming from two monthly donors into Paypal, and a recent $102.32 ACH
payment from Google AdSense into the checking account in January --
which tends to come in roughly once a year as the earnings from ads
accrue more than Google's $100 payment threshold.

So: we're in good shape to go on like this, just about forever at this rate! :-)

Thanks,

-dave