Those that know me understand that accepting donations was a difficult step for me to take. I have had this site as a hobby for about 5 years now as it steadily grew from the most basic of interactive pages to something a little more useable and pretty. Until recently the cost of the site was not horribly expensive ranging from $8 to $20.00 a month. Not a whole lot really when you consider the enjoyment I get out of it and the fun we all have with it. Through time with the help of many people and their thoughts, encouragement, and talent the site slowly grew.
When V2.0 starting taking off we started running into some difficulty. A shared server is usually pretty powerful but also somewhat limiting. SQL queries started maxing out and bandwidth requirements exceeded the first two hosts. Then the intermittent downtime starting plaguing us when nobody could get to the site for chunks of time. The second move, where we currently are, was a planned stepping stone before having to get into our own server, a Virtual Private Server to be exact. In this location we have already been shutdown once for too much CPU usage and, under the right circumstances, that will soon happen again especially as we continue to grow as I know we will. So that next step is a large step in cost from $19.99/mo to 39.99/mo. There is a deal to get 2 months free if you pay a year in advance but don't want to do that till we test the server. That will save us a bit if we can do it that way. I can still handle paying it, but the burden would be greatly relieved if I was to get some help with it. So that is where we are. Probably this weekend I will make the request and we will be moved to our own virtual server. There we will have all our own resources that should be plenty to keep the site going into the future. The bonus is that I will be able to optimize the server specifically for this site's usage instead of dealing with the default setup.
I also want to keep a very open line of communication as I don't want there to be any doubts as to what the donation will be going. There will need to be some discussions on (and up to the person donating) how they want their donations to be displayed if at all, status of donation pool, status of payments, etc. Since it is your donation I want you to know exactly what is happening with it. How we handle this will be decided over the next couple weeks.
The donation button is now in the footer (bottom of the page) of the main Citadel.
Special thanks to those that wish to donate. Thanks, also, to those that don't wish to donate or can't. The site is only here because of the great people that visit and contribute to the site. So simply enjoy the site and use it as it was intended. There is no obligation whatsoever and, if nobody donates, it wouldn't hurt my feelings a bit and I'd still be happy to cover the cost. Just don't want there to be any sort of sense of obligation or guilt for not donating, because there's no reason for it. Enjoy the site!
