Last night GC's webserver was significantly overloaded for a period of time, causing GC to be unresponsive. The same thing happened a few days ago as well. My guess is that either GC is getting hit with bursts of site visitors that the server cannot handle or some piece of server hardware is close to failing. Either way it's a problem that should be addressed.
The current rented webserver is nearing upon 3 years of 24/7 heavy usage and it's probably time for it to be retired.
All previous server upgrades over the years I covered myself, but this time around I cannot handle the cost and must ask for your help.
I've already purchased around $3k worth of parts for this next server upgrade as I knew it would be needed sometime soon. But I am literally tapped out financially and there's still approximately $750 in costs to make this next server upgrade happen.
The parts I still need for this are
two hard drives ($500),
two drive adapters ($40) and $200 in software licensing fees that I need to catch up on.
With the parts I already purchased and these other few parts that are still needed, GC will have a very significantly upgraded server. It will be way faster and more capable of handling bursts of traffic or site growth as compared to the current server.
26 new GC subscriptions would cover the costs that I described above. I'd pay for the rest of these parts myself, but I simply can't do it.
I'm still in the early stages of setting up the various bonus account features for GC subscribers. Most of the good stuff is not setup yet, but I will get it done very soon. That's why I haven't put any major promotion behind the subscriptions just yet, since I still have some more setup work to finish. It's fairly urgent that the new server is online before the old server eventually crashes. Hopefully there are at least 26 GCers who are willing to become subscribers so this server ugprade can happen.
Whether or not you become a GC supporting member by subscribing, it will still be helpful to keep this thread active for a while so plenty of GCers see it. Please post a few comments, replies, etc.
If anyone would rather just send a donation instead of (or in addition to) subscribing, direct contributions can be sent via
PayPal to
contributions@greekchat.com
Also, if anyone would be inclined to purchase a piece of the computer hardware above & have it shipped to my address, we can do that as well (send me a PM about it).
Thanks in advance to anyone who helps out with funding this server upgrade project.
