Help Miraheze stay online in 2022!

Miraheze is a not-for-profit and open source project with the purpose of providing free and accessible online collaborative and editing environments to communities, organisations and individuals alike. Since 2015, we have been providing high-quality wiki hosting and support to serve thousands of communities. Miraheze runs on the power of volunteers contributing in various ways, such as writing content, handling support requests and funding the organisation. The project model is community-centric and gives all stakeholders an important voice in the development of Miraheze. Miraheze is an ad-free and independent wiki farm; therefore, all donations are provided by community members.

 

Results of the past year

Miraheze does not currently have physical housing costs and all volunteers are unpaid. As a result of that, more than 95% of our expenses go towards the servers required to keep Miraheze running. In 2019, a fundraising campaign was set up to fund Miraheze a new server cluster. While the original ideas were not implemented since our fundraising goal was not reached, we have implemented new ideas that were financially feasible for Miraheze. Even though the new plan would not cause a dramatic reduction in the monthly expenses (OpEx), it would avoid the need for huge one-time investments (CapEx). At the end of 2020 we held a new fundraising campaign where we unfortunately fell short of our fundraising goal but the funds that were raised allowed us to continue paying for the server cluster. Ever since the start of 2020 when the pandemic first began started Miraheze's traffic has been steadily growing.

 

As of October 12, 2021, our account balance is £2588.57. The current balance is sufficient until May 2022 (see graph). Miraheze aims to be transparent in its operations and allows anyone to review financial data via the Finance page. Finally, financial summaries from the governing Board are public as well.

 

Current financial situation

Miraheze has kept growing in terms of traffic. Back in December 2020 when we held our last fundraiser we had about 120,000 unique visitors per day. Now, in October 2021 we have about 145,000 unique visitors per day (+20%). In 2021, the costs have increased from ~£245/month (December 2020) to ~£340/month (October 2021), which is about 39% more than last year. While the community growth is awesome news for a community-centric project like Miraheze, the increase in traffic requires resource upgrades to allow us to cope with the growth of the project. Our monitoring systems show there is not much room for growth, causing stability issues at peak times.

 

If we were to anticipate another ~20% growth in traffic from October 2021 to October 2022 (from 145,000 unique visitors/day in October 2021 to 175,000 in October 2022), we are considering upgrading certain parts of infrastructure Q1 or Q2 2022, on top of keeping our current servers. We are also currently in the process of implementing a new backup system. Expenses are estimated to climb to remain at £340/month which is +/- £4010 per year.

 

An overview of this plan is visible at Miraheze Meta .

 

Impact of my donation

Miraheze offers high quality wiki hosting and support, thanks to the gracious, fortunate, and appreciated monetary contributions of many volunteers. By contributing via donations, you help to keep a collaboration platform free and functional for dozens of universities, educational workings groups and other not-for-profit communities. Your donation also helps us to stay ad-free and independent.

 

We do not require a minimum amount: £10 is a perfect starting point for a one-time donation. If you wish to make recurring donations, £5/month is also very gracious. Shall you want to donate more in order to cover the costs for those communities who can't, other donation amounts are welcome as well. Miraheze aims for the 'many hands make light work' model: 200 users donating £20 per year or 170 users donating £2 per month, either option allows Miraheze to invest back into the community.

 

If you have any questions, suggestions or want to find out how you can support Miraheze beyond just donating, you can write on the talk page or email us using sre[at]miraheze[dot]org.