Occasional Web Site Slowness

Just a suggestion, I for one love browsing the site and participating sometimes and am very glad it is here - you are providing a great service.

Gem,

As much as I appreciate the idea. I would really rather not start any kind of charging, be it donation or otherwise. My intent from the beginning was to create a place, totally free, and without asking for any donation or money, where people can go to share their ideas, freely and without fear of ridicule. Also a place to unite all paranormal investigators, and give support to them as well as those who need help.

I'm hoping that somewhere down the road, the site can become fully ad-supported. And perhaps we'll market some materials for sale, or services to try to help pay for fees.

But the site itself will remain free, and without any ads that bug people to donate.

Not sure how popular this suggestion may be, but I have seen quite a few forums, blogs etc where there is a paypal link for people to donate? A few pennies here and there may add up and help with the running costs. I shall now duck behind my monitor...

Folks,

Some of you may have noticed from time to time when the site gets particularly busy at certain times of day it slows down a bit in response time. With all the new growth in the new year we're starting to push the limits of the environment in which the site currently resides.

I own a web hosting company, and it currently resides in a shared environtment within one virtual server, which is on a redundant physical server array. Well, at certain times of day some automatic tasks kick off which slow the site down a bit if it beoomes very busy at the same time.

We own a hosting company called MPC Systems, and this site was dedicated by that company towards the paranormal community. But as we grow we will need to move to some dedicated servers purposed strictly to this site.

There is a significant cost involved in this, so I was hoping to move that into a timeframe when the site starts to pay its own expenses. But I'll try to fund that on my own very shortly, to speed it up. Currently as it stands the operating expenses for the site are roughly $200 per month. When I move that to physical servers that will go up to $300 per month, and will cost roughly $1800 for the additional hardware.

So please bear with me with I'm working on making that happen.

Thanks and my apologies for the slowness occasionally.