Uh Oh, May Need a Dedicated Server
The sites were offline this morning as I exceeded my CPU share this AM. Many apologies!
I think these sites may finally have outgrown a shared hosting environment. My host, who I quite like, offers a managed dedicated server which would prevent these sort of problems…for roughly twice what I pay now.
So…is there anything that could be offered on these sites which you would pay a bit of money to access to help offset the cost of the hosting? Keep the current material free, but is there something you would pay to access? Or a number of records per day, or…?
This isn’t a critical, the-site-will-go-offline-or-else, decision–but the site would be steadier and things like image uploads and what-not would be smoother. Plus, because I’m a working stiff who can’t dedicate as much time as I like to these sites–if I could pay myself for a full day or two per month to work on this there would be a lot of progress (relative to right now, anyway!).
I wish I could say the “donate” button has worked, but (and I do thank the folks who have donated) only ten people have clicked it in seven years. The eBay affiliate stuff brings in enough to cover the current hosting, and, again, I thank everyone who clicks through to eBay via the links on the site (and then bids and wins an item!), but not really enough to support the dedicated box.
It’s a bit of a conundrum. To repeat, we’re in no danger of going offline, but it would be nice to sort this stuff out. I’m not really interested in non-managed hosting, as I don’t have the tech chops to manage a web server on top of everything else that goes on around here.
