The Shmeng Hosting Fund

For the last few years, Shmeng has been running on my server at home using my DSL line to connect it to the net. I was fine with paying the $40/month to keep it online, but since I've been unemployed for so long my DSL is going to be disconnected soon, so I moved the site to a hosting provider. The hosting provider charges $50/month for the level of service we have now. This money has been coming out of my unemployment checks, which are going to end soon.

I won't be able to keep paying for the site with no income, so for the site to stay online the members are going to have to make donations to cover the hosting costs. You can make a one time donation, or a recurring monthly donation. I've decided to use PayPal to process the payments, since it's the most secure and the easiest way to keep track of how much money is coming in.

Your credit card information is only stored by PayPal. I never see it, and it's not stored anywhere on the Shmeng server. PayPal is insured and is set up to deal with credit card problems, and I don't want to deal with that stuff. If you want to donate by check, that can be arranged, but please consider using PayPal first since it's way easier for everybody.

Right now the monthly bill is $50/month, so once the current month and the next month is covered, the "Donate" box will disappear until next month. I am planning on writing some code to show who has donated and how close we are to having the next month covered, but I don't have time to write it right now (you will still be able to donate anonymously if you want). If you want to know how close we are, just send me a note.

If you don't like the level of service we have right now (slowness and downtime), the best thing to do is to set up a monthly donation. You can end your monthly donations any time through PayPal. If we get to the point where the monthly donations would cover a faster and more reliable machine, I will move the site to someplace better.

Donate Any Amount Once
Donate $5 every other month
Donate $5/month
Donate $10/month
Donate $30/month




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