First of all, SOOOO MANY THANKS to everyone that has donated so far. You have no idea how much it helps. Lee used to split the cost with me, and when we lost him, it not only took a bite out of my soul, but now it’s eating my wallet. Your help is so frigging amazing and I thank each and every one of you (some I have, and I owe a BUNCH of you some email, I know!)

Secondly,a few folks have offered up cheaper hosting solutions, so I wanted to let you all know why I keep this box at this monthly price:

1. It’s a bit high, but I get almost total freedom from Softlayer. They have only bothered me about content three times, and all three times I was clearly in the wrong (I was violating copyright. Mostly with pics of boobs owned by Playboy). They received DMCA takedown notices and passed them along. Otherwise, they could not care less what I do. That is pretty nice.
2. Really stable datacenter. You’ll notice that some of the big political blogs all disappear together fairly often.  There’s a couple of hosts out there they all use, and they crash with alarming regularity. I get pretty consistent service.
3. Most service tickets are free. Many of the discount hosts charge $5, $10, even $20 PER incident. It’s how they offer such cheap hosting. I only pay if I ask them to do something extra, and then it’s only $3 per ticket. Basic service is free, and OS reloads, upgrades, add-ons etc.? $3. Gotta love that.
4. The hardware is pretty solid. I can’t add any as it is not a co-lo but their box, so donated hardware wouldn’t help much either unfortunately.

So yeah...the monthly rate is higher than I could get elsewhere but I really feel like I get decent service for the cost, and if you’ve been around since the old old days you’ll know how important that is! We were up and down like a yo-yo before I switched to Softlayer.

Also, you may have noticed the $1500 goal. I picked that number because it represents 6 months of server fees. That would take a huge load off my wallet’s shoulders and allow me to breathe a lot easier for at least a year or so. Hopefully we can reach the goal. If you have a blog, please help out by making a post that links back here. Or if you have an in with a much more important blogger out there who could help us publicize the server drive...email them for us? An Insta-lanche wouldn’t go amiss. :)

Obama ain’t payin’ our bills, apparently he knows we didn’t vote for him. So spread the word!