Donations

Okay, here goes:

As most of you know I'm a college student, and studying what I do is a full-time job. So without any additional income I have to carefully manage my money. In Q1 2001 my PC went to hell and I had to replace about every part there is. During that time of hardware problems many have suggested I should use offer the possibility for my readers to make a final contribution to my operations.

Running a website like mine doesn't come cheap. The site generates about 500GB traffic a month and finding a host willing to offer that for a reasonable price is pretty hard. Fortunately there are nice people out there who offer me hosting for free so that I won't have to shut down or go bankrupt. But there are other costs to consider as well: redirection services, domain registrations, DNS hosting and last but not least Internet connection. Especially the last one comes up every month and as you may know in Europe there's no free local phone calls and with a site like mine I have to get something faster than a regular modem so I pay about $40 a month for a 256/64kbit/s DSL. And even with that, if there's large softwares to upload the 64kbit is not really enough to do the upload to my 3 servers in reasonable time, so I'd like to upgrade but that would add another 50% to my monthly bill.

We've also recently started using another bulletin board software. Ezboard discontinued the popup-ad free service called CSC blue and we were left with the possibilities to get swamped with popup ads every time we go there, pay an exorbitant amount (at that time it was like $1400 a year, by now it would be even more as the number of daily visitors is growing rapidly.), or switch to another board. As all free services will sooner or later come up with a way to cover their costs we opted for the last of the 3 solutions and since early October we're using our own board software. Thanks to some nice people we get the hosting for free (21GB in the first month only.. and we use up a lot of CPU time, too) at least for the moment. But the board software wasn't free and to get continued support and have access to new releases we have to pay a yearly rate (though it's much lower than the price of the software).

Also, at some point I'd like to take care of some outstanding registrations for software I use daily for my site.

So, why am I not simply putting up banners on my page? I personally dislike banners a lot and the collapse of the Internet advertising bubble has lead to much lower revenue generated by these kind of services. An alternative are popup ads, but there I have no words to express how much I dislike them and I think I'm not the only one here. You may know that some of the other DVD ripping sites have chosen this model and if you go there now you'll be hit by a barrage of popups which you usually only can get rid of by closing the browser altogether. I wouldn't want this to happen.

Last but not least consider that I spend a lot of my free-time on this site so that you can get the latest news and learn about the latest technology and encoding ways before you can read it anywhere else. At times I have no free-time at all since maintaining this site eats is all up. To sum it all up:

By donating you will help insure the continued existence of doom9.net and help it remain the place where you can always expect the latest news and introductions to the latest technologies.

There's two ways to donate: Kagi and PayPal. The first allows you to make donations via Credit Card, Check, Money Order or even by sending money via regular mail, the latter allows Credit Cards or PayPal account founded transfers. Pick whichever you prefer and thanks a lot in advance.