Air Gun Home :: View topic

AirGunEric · Site Admin

After being poked by a couple people a number of weeks ago about "where is a donation banner or button" and our recent bumping up against our bandwidth limits on the hosting service, the Donation button is up once again.

I don't know if anyone will donate, it is certainly not some sort of requirement- but if they do, they will get a special user "rank" of Supporting Member for one year. If someone were to donate $100 USD or more, they will also get a 'lifetime' airgunhome.com email address. By this, it means they will be able to choose whatever they like as long as it isn't offensive or confusing, an email address they can use- for example "xyz123@airgunhome.com". 'Lifetime' means as long as airgunhome.com's forum exists in its current form.

If no one donates, I will remove the Donate button in a few weeks. If we can raise enough money to cover what will be our soon-to-be increased hosting fees for the next year through donations, I will remove the Google ads from the forum pages.

As a bit of an explanation, AirGunHome.com has now been around long enough (10 months) and been listed on the major search engines since the start. Over the summer, just the people visiting the forum was putting us close to going over our bandwidth allotment; in the last few days, Google has been constantly monitoring the site and has absorbed 50% of our bandwidth allotment in less than a week. Previously, Google only absorbed about 15% of the bandwidth in an entire month.

Why is this occurring? Because we have a lot of internet traffic coming to the forum, we are highly ranked on the major search engines and we have been around for nearly a year. Google's algorithms take this into account and decide we need to be indexed and monitored even more closely in order to ensure they have "all" our content, as up-to-date as possible, available through their search engine.

In effect, we have "proven" to the machine that we have current, useful content that people find useful. This is also why we have seen an average of 2 new "confirmed" registered members every day over the last few months. The number of people who have visited the site so far this month (December) is already ahead of the number of people who visited in a one-week period in June, July and August- the "prime" airgun months of the year. The bottom-line is that AirGunHome's success is growing, and so are the costs to keep it running smoothly.

Normally I don't like to stand around with my hat in my hand, and eventually we may pick up a sponsor or two and maybe have some airgun raffles- but for now "donations" seems to be the most direct and simplest manner to keep everything moving ahead smoothly.