Random Musings – The Current Situation
As you’ve probably noticed, this site has been hit pretty hard with traffic last and this week – more than it’s ever been. Since the new year started, the numbers have been rising steadily, and this Thursday alone got about 24,000 visits, 145,000 page loads, and 2.4 million hits. The main problems right now are resource/CPU usage and maximum connections per period of time – the latter is the reason the site is giving all those “Service Temporarily Unavailable” messages. I, along with our friendly network administrator Maestro, have been considering moving us to a dedicated solution, but this would cost a lot more per month than either of us can afford.
The two obvious ways to generate the money needed to keep this site running are ads and donations. If we were to run ads, most likely you’d find them on the sidebar and maybe right above the comments box. If we were to ask for donations, it would have to be a monthly thing. I’m not quite sure yet what the target would be, but a safe estimate would be about $150 per month. Running ads might be the most surefire way of getting to that amount, but I hate to do it because it goes against everything I stand for – you may have noticed that there have never been any ads on this site for the year and a half that it’s been up. That being said, I’m also uncomfortable running a monthly donation drive because it would mean that you the readers would have to pay out of your own pockets, and I’m afraid we might not always get that amount.
Neither solution is particularly to my liking, but this site cannot stay as it currently is, so we’ll have to do something. All in all, I’m incredibly frustrated right now because I really don’t want to have to deal with any of this – I just want to blog.
Comments/Suggestions/Solutions are always welcome, especially if you voted “Other” in the poll.
