Dear Angels,
Due to the fees involved with maintaining Charlie's website, I've decided to begin asking for donations again. Donating is completely voluntary and will stay that way. But any little contribution you can make will earn my eternal gratitude and help keep the puppies in bones and the kitty in litter.
Below I've outlined the current expenditures. You may not be interested, but I think it's only fair that you know where the money is going. In every case I looked at alternatives and made my decision to go with a particular service based on several factors, some of which I've stated here. If you want to know more, you're welcome to .
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With Charlie's permission, I became the registrant of the domain name CHARLESDANCE.CO.UK in 1998. The site outgrew my personal webspace allowance at Netcomuk in 2001. Since 2002, the Homepage has been hosted at Supanames.co.uk under their Linux Value Package at a cost of £13.99/year + VAT (renewed every two years). This includes free renewal of the domain name.
Info: This is the cheap and cheerful web-hosting solution. No annoying 'data transfer' (page & image view) computations, no set-up fee, no domain renewal fee. Compared to competitors, Supanames is quite good bang for the buck...so much so that I moved our business site there too.
- In February 2008, I added 100Mb of webspace to the 150Mb that came with the package for a total of 250Mb. This cost £35.24 including VAT and appears to be a recurring, yearly charge as my last renewal invoice, dated 5 Aug 2008, came to £73.41. I had to add webspace as with all the images in the Stalls and elsewhere on the site, we were quickly running out of room. We are currently using 73% of the available webspace.
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The Message Board is hosted at Network54 on their Premier Account, Level 1, at a cost of $34.95 every six months. Level 1 provides 0-100,000 page views per month with no ads. (A "page view" is any time someone reads a message.) Level 0 is free with ads, Level 2 is 100,000-2,000,000 page views per month with no ads, so Level 1 is a good fit for us. The next payment is due Aug 1, 2009.
Info: There are innumerable message board providers on the net; most have a free service. However, a poll of the Angels around the time of the move to Network54 showed they preferred the 'threaded' style board, which is not widely available anymore as a hosted service and, when free, is very basic, lacks security features and is typically rife with ads.
The main reason I opted for Network54's Premier Account Level 1 rather than their free Level 0 service was to keep the Message Board ad-free. Since I added the 'View Thread' feature, which allows us to view an entire thread rather than one message at a time, our average number of page views/month has dropped from 16,000 to around 9,000.
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Since 2008 there has been no charge for the guestbook or Angel Bio feature as I've adapted free scripts for both and run them from my webspace on Supanames.
Here's the overview: $50.30 -- web hosting/year at March 2009 exchange rates (£62.48 + £9.37 15% VAT / 2)
+ $69.90 -- Message Board for a year
$ 120.20 -- Total approximate outlay per year
Now, I don't expect to get that whole amount back in donations each year. (The last time I asked for donations was in 2004.) I started the site; I'm happy to bear the burden of costs for its necessary evolution. But like I said above, any contribution will be gratefully accepted. In fact, the maximum I will allow any one Angel to donate in a year is $10.00 (or its equivalent in your currency). Send me more and you'll find your hard-earned money right back where it started. You listenin', Doc? ;)
That's it. The donate button is below; it'll take you to the PayPal site. I won't take donations any other way, so if you aren't a member of PayPal either sign up or forget about it, I'll understand. :) And even if you can't help right now, thank you for reading. It shows your heart is in the right place.
With gratitude,
contact
Donations for '09 so far:
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