Suggestion Donation Link?

[Our Wasted Years]

Honestly it would be a good idea. I remember you guys had something like that back when I used to lurk here. I mean you have 3 servers and are getting 503'd left and right so you clearly need more server power, around 4-5..it is a Wiki after all. I know a few people would pitch in some money to help out.

So what do you think?

 

[Archaic]

Firstly....you guys couldn't hope to donate enough money to actually get us another server, sorry. We're not buying things off the rack here. We long since passed 6 digit annual server costs.

Secondly...we honestly wouldn't feel right in asking for money from everyone, when we're making more than enough money from adverts right now. We probably could add a 4th server right now, though it'd be a bit of a stretch. The issue is actually justifying it financially. Right now, we're experiencing unusually high load because of the launch fever, but it remains to be seen if that's a permanent increase, or if it's a short term spike. If it continues into April, then we'll be seriously looking at a 4th, but until then, we're going to be focusing our efforts on tweaking and improving the load balancing between our 3 servers, because on paper we should be able to support all the load we're getting right now, if we can only find the sweet spot.

 

[Our Wasted Years]

Firstly....you guys couldn't hope to donate enough money to actually get us another server, sorry. We're not buying things off the rack here. We long since passed 6 digit annual server costs.

Secondly...we honestly wouldn't feel right in asking for money from everyone, when we're making more than enough money from adverts right now. We probably could add a 4th server right now, though it'd be a bit of a stretch. The issue is actually justifying it financially. Right now, we're experiencing unusually high load because of the launch fever, but it remains to be seen if that's a permanent increase, or if it's a short term spike. If it continues into April, then we'll be seriously looking at a 4th, but until then, we're going to be focusing our efforts on tweaking and improving the load balancing between our 3 servers, because on paper we should be able to support all the load we're getting right now, if we can only find the sweet spot.

Ah shit I forgot about the Ad money you guys get, should have thought about that first. So the servers will basically pay for themselves if you're getting traffic and people are clicking the Ads, right?

 

[Archaic]

They already do pay for themselves, with a bit extra on top that we've spent on things like the Christmas contest, the software license fees, hiring our tech, etc.

Go have a look at the blog post I made a few days ago. In this launch fever, we're basically grappling with 20x regular load (4x normal peak load). Buying enough servers to handle all that isn't really an option, when it's so unlikely that load is going to stay at that level for more than a week.