support sponsorsadvertise here
 
 


 
Site Navigation



Related Links

Donations
BG Merch
Shopping
Offers
Merchandise




BuffyGuide.com — The Complete Buffy Episode Guide
Supporting BuffyGuide.com




Due to the substantial cost of running this site, I need help (or a winning lottery ticket) in order to keep the site running. If you like this site, you can help to keep it going. There are a few ways that you can help, outlined below.

  • Donate — Donations of any size are most helpful and greatly appreciated. You can sign up to make an automatic monthly donation via credit card or electronic check, or you can make a one-time donation in a variety of ways.

  • BuffyGuide Email — Get a BuffyGuide email address! For just $10 per year, you can get webmail, POP3 access, or a forwarding address, and your payment will offset our server costs.

  • Shop Online — BuffyGuide.com is affiliated with a number of online merchants. When you click one of our links to these stores and make a purchase, this site earns a commission (generally 5-15% of the purchase price). (You can also visit the Merchandise section of the site to browse for Buffy items from affiliated stores.)

  • Buy BuffyGuide.com Merchandise — Show your support for BuffyGuide.com by buying items sporting BuffyGuide.com logos! Get t-shirts, sweatshirts, boxers, mugs, mousepads, and more, in a variety of cool designs. Proceeds from merchandise sales go toward site costs.

  • Sign Up for Advertised Offers — Through affiliations with various ad networks, BuffyGuide.com also earns a commission when you sign up for various advertised offers/sites/services. Many of these are free to you (such as submitting a poem to the Poetry.com contest); others are not (such as joining a book club, or the BMG Music Service).

  • Let the advertisements load — Though they don't earn buckets of money, some of the ads on this site (most of the banners at the top of each page, and the pop-up ads) do earn some revenue per impression — in other words, they earn money just by you letting them load. I know it's tempting to leave certain pages before they load, and I know that some of you use software to "turn them off." But it is helpful if you let them load, and it costs you nothing more than a couple of seconds. Clicking on them is also helpful, so once in a while, try actually looking at them -- if you see something interesting, click (it'll open in a new window).

Why Help and Support Are Needed

This site is very expensive to run. Since its inception, it's grown a lot, and become very large and involved. Moreover, traffic has grown a lot — the amount of people visiting these site has always moved in an upward trend, and still does. Many websites are hosted on what's called a "shared" server or host. This means that hundreds of sites are stored on the same computer, and share the same connection from that computer to the internet. This is not very expensive. Unfortunately, once a site gets quite large and/or popular, it can no longer share a server with other sites — it must have a server all to itself, what's called a "dedicated" server. This is expensive. (Of course, there's a sliding scale — some sites need many servers all to themselves. For example, Google runs on thousands of servers. (Info here.))

There are a few basic reasons why some sites need a dedicated server. Basically, it comes down to space, bandwidth, and server load/resources. When a site is consuming too much of one or more of these things, a shared web host won't host it anymore, and will kick that site off. That's not to be mean; they simply have to do that in order to allow the other sites to run smoothly. (Some information on the myth of "unlimited bandwidth" and how bandwidth works can be found here, here, and here.)

Just trying to give you a little informative backstory. Anyway, this site is one of those that is too big and popular to fit on a shared server, so it's had its own dedicated server since June, 2000. There was a very brief time period a few years ago when the advertising revenue covered the costs in full, but as many of you may know, the internet advertising business fell into a pit, and thus it's been a long time since the ad revenue from this site covered more than a fraction of the costs. A little was been covered by advertising and affiliate earnings (i.e. from Amazon.com), and a little was covered by donations here and there. For the most part, it was covered by my credit cards. crazy But the situation could not keep going that way, so eventually I had to start asking for donation.

I'll continue do whatever I can to keep this site going, as I always have done. I don't want to close it. But, unfortunately, I do need help in order to make continuing the site a possibility. Thus, if you can help in any way — be it through a one-time donation, a monthly donation, shopping online via links from this site to our affiliated stores, or signing up for offers that earn a commission for this site — it would be greatly appreciated.

 
 
---


Disclaimer & CopyrightsPrivacy Policy