The biggest cost I (and my small team of story editors) put into this site is time. I can afford to donate that, even if I am perpetually short on it (witness the fact that I still haven't done the code migration and site upgrade i talked about a few months ago). I can afford the $100 a year or so outlay for the server space at a commercial webhost.
I don't understand the admin of Furnpike. He's been on alt.fan.furry whining about how no one supported him because no one knew about the site...and then he complains that he had to shut the site down because the traffic load was too high and he couldn't afford the bandwidth. Huh? He claims to have been getting 750 unique visits a day. Flayrah gets 200 on a real good day, and I'm thrilled to death with that amount of traffic.
I made a decision a while ago to not ask for donations. Flayrah will remain a free service to the furry community for just as long as I can stand running it. I don't get a whole lot of thanks for doing it and I'm not asking for any, but when someone I don't even know recognizes my name (at Anthrocon, for example), and tells me what a great job I'm doing with Flayrah, that makes the time investment worth it.
The biggest cost I (and my small team of story editors) put into this site is time. I can afford to donate that, even if I am perpetually short on it (witness the fact that I still haven't done the code migration and site upgrade i talked about a few months ago). I can afford the $100 a year or so outlay for the server space at a commercial webhost.
I don't understand the admin of Furnpike. He's been on alt.fan.furry whining about how no one supported him because no one knew about the site...and then he complains that he had to shut the site down because the traffic load was too high and he couldn't afford the bandwidth. Huh? He claims to have been getting 750 unique visits a day. Flayrah gets 200 on a real good day, and I'm thrilled to death with that amount of traffic.
I made a decision a while ago to not ask for donations. Flayrah will remain a free service to the furry community for just as long as I can stand running it. I don't get a whole lot of thanks for doing it and I'm not asking for any, but when someone I don't even know recognizes my name (at Anthrocon, for example), and tells me what a great job I'm doing with Flayrah, that makes the time investment worth it.