I was adding up some numbers about what the pool has received in transaction fees and donations.
7.726362 BTC in transaction fees since it started (more than I thought it would be)
16.98413925529879 in SMPPS donations
3.65 BTC in donations from the proportional payment system
~4.5 BTC in manual donations
For a total of about 32.86 BTC.
Approximate costs so far, using $13 USD as the exchange rate.
$140 June Amazon bill (10.83 BTC)
$353 July Amazon bill (27.15 BTC) (includes a fair amount of time running two servers, one for testing SMPPS)
$33 August Amazon bill so far (2.53 BTC)
~7 BTC in donations to SimpleCoin,Ozcoin,jgarzik,IceyEC/Lego, for their software/help/contribution to making the pool possible.
14 BTC in first 3 block bounties
For a total of about 61.51 BTC.
So, the pool is still in the hole about ~28.65 BTC depending on how you look at it (include my donations, bounties, or not.) This doesn't include some additional incentives I paid to try and get some of the first miners to join and get the pool off the ground.
Anyways, this isn't a plea for more donations, and I really don't want to start another discussion about this stuff right now. I was just doing the numbers for myself, so I thought I would post them.
Hosting the server at Amazon is quite expensive, but I think it has been pretty dang stable and performant. We are at 1 minute of downtime in the last 7 days,
http://stats.pingdom.com/4cr8bt233281/376311. Our current load average with ~340 GH/s is 0.10, 0.12, 0.13. So we should be able to handle quite a few more miners. So, invite your friends! I want to see what we can handle, and wouldn't mind having to set up a second server!