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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.
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. 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. |
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