Dear Nintendo Enthusiasts and Fans,
We have been highly focused for the past eight months on becoming the best Nintendo fan site out there in terms of original content and news coverage. We have close to 30 staff members working for free to bring you round the clock Nintendo excitement. That includes a full-time web programmer and a site artist. In the future we plan on expanding with even more ideas such as a Nintendo comic, Über-Articles (massive features that have close to 25 articles-in-one), and thorough coverage of the upcoming E3 and the Wii U. We hope you’ve enjoyed our content until now, but we need your help.
As the site has expanded I’ve had to continue upgrading the server as our traffic grows and the content we offer becomes more taxing on the server, with images, video, and the like. We started off as a free WordPress blog, moved up to shared hosting, transferred over to a powerful Virtual Private Server, and even had to double the resources on our VPS.
Unfortunately, our server host, Hostgator informed me yesterday that with our rise in traffic and content we have started to disturb other sites using the same server by overloading the system resources. They recommended we move to a completely dedicated server because if our site has another spike in traffic and disturbs the other sites on the server they will be forced to shut us down.
I’d like to move Nintendo Enthusiast to a dedicated server but it would mean that the site would cost me well over $1000 a year and I simply don’t have that kind of money. I have a wife and three kids and I’ve been trying to figure out how to balance my budget even without the extra financial strain of the site. If Hostgator takes down the site and won’t allow it to go up unless we move to a dedicated server, I’m not sure I will be able to take on that financial burden. Instead of waiting for such a crisis to happen, I would like to preempt it by turning to the community and asking for your help in financing the site. Think of it as a Kickstarter Project, although we’re already providing you with the content as we speak so you won’t have to wait.
If we can raise at least $1000 I’ll move the site over to a dedicated server, otherwise, we’ll just have to pray that Hostgator doesn’t have to take down the site due to the overload on system resources.
If you have anything to donate, even $5, we’d greatly appreciate it. The Donate Button on the right side of the site can be used to support the Enthusiast cause. If you leave us your name, the editors will collaborate together to make a feature on the site to show our appreciation for all the donors. We’ll also provide a link on the main menu of the site to a Dedication page, listing all our sponsors and donors, so everyone can see for the duration of the site’s existence, who helped us to stay in existence and to whom we owe a debt of gratitude.
So, please, help us out now by donating, and we will be forever grateful!
Your Editor-in-Chief,
Menashe
