Skilifts.org / SORT Forum

I have shifted my usual yearly donation drive from March to December. Last year we received over $1000 in donations and over $500 was donated to Cystic Fibrosis (Fill The Boot). For better bookkeeping, I decided to move it up three months. I already plan out the next years expenses and start to arrange what needs to paid and when, and since I am a yearly planner, I figured December was a good time to include it with my personal budget spending for the year.

This year I am setting the goal at $1000 and I am asking for donations to help keep this big (or maybe I should use the term massive) snowball moving. Currently all expenses (aside from the donations of last year) comes out of my pockets. In a time when the economy is down and expenses seem to be up, its easy to say that if money was to become tight, that this website could be on the list for closure. I do try very hard to keep this site up and running with the latest security upgrades and software, but in the end it all cost money.

So I am not asking everyone to drop a $100 bill (even though that would be very cool and very appreciated), but donate what you feel you can afford. I ask that if you find this site and it's resources helpful to you and your crew, put a value on it. We have been a resource for almost 11 years online. Most of the discussions on the board go back a decade and you can usually find any answers you might be looking for on our website.

I have covered our yearly costs on previous drives, and yes, I am going to list them again:

Hosting Fees $960.00
Domain Name Fees $40.00
Software $130.00

Total $1130.00 a year (plus a few extras that happen to pop up).

Thanks,

The Skilifts.org Team

I'm in!
How about you?

Dino

Game on !!

Come on everyone, let's bump this amount up to where it needs to be!

Dino

I have to fix a glitch, will be back online soon.

UPDATE!
I have fixed the problem and were back in business.

$960 for hosting WTF, who are you hosting with, ill host the site for $100

K2Trav, on 29 November 2010 - 09:29 PM, said:

Good hosting comes at a cost. This site has been up with no downtime for a very long time. Everything comes at a cost.


ON that note, Bill I will send you some cash around Christmas time.
This post has been edited by Kicking Horse: 30 November 2010 - 09:15 AM

A few years ago we were on a shared hosting plan, but the site was constantly going down quite frequently and would be down for days. This was simply because of other people using the server and causing it to crash. We decided to go on a semi dedicated server, which is the reason why our hosting fees are expensive. However, since we also have a reseller plan, Bill also hosts other people (his friend's websites) on our server (nw-hosting.com), which helps subsidizes the cost.

I should also mention that while shared hosting features unlimited storage and transfer, you are now limited on the number of files you can host. We ran into this problem too, which is why we went the semi-dedicated route.

SkiBachelor, on 30 November 2010 - 10:09 AM, said:

Hi Bill and all,

I happen to co-own (and am the network admin for) a regional ISP and server colocation company in southern Oregon and have a generator-backed data center with redundant GigE (1000mbps) fiber connections, if the current hosting arrangement proves too pricey (which from the contents of this thread, it sounds like you're paying an aweful lot for just a virtual server). What's the actual monthly data transfer on your virtual server?

-Ryan
This post has been edited by rniemi: 01 December 2010 - 02:45 AM

Hey Bill , once I get some cash in the online debit card I'll get some coin coming your way .. thanx for your dedication to this site. Augie