As some of the older users may be aware, TBL is currently hosted on Octavian's account with EuroHost. Octavian is a former moderator of TBL and co-founded the site along with Archibalduk. Over the past six and a half years Octavian has very generously allowed TBL to continue to be hosted on his account free of charge. Octavian has paid for all costs associated with hosting the site.
Over the past year, TBL's traffic has risen sharply. Our monthly bandwidth has doubled from approximately 29gb to 60gb per month. This volume of traffic is putting a great strain on the server. TBL now uses 60% of the server's total resources. This is resulting in server crashes (many of you may have occasionally had difficulty accessing the site over the past few months) and is taking up all of the bandwidth from Octavian's web sites (such as his very popular AceMasters site). This is clearly unfair on Octavian.
Therefore TBL needs to move to its own server. Even though Octavian does not have as much involvement with TBL these days, he still shares our strong belief that the TBL and EHM community must continue for as long as there is interest:
Not only this, but Octavian has offered to fund the new sever. This is incredible news and ensures that TBL will continue to run for as long as possible. However, it does not seem quite right that Octavian should have to pay all of the costs. I feel it is only right that I also make an annual contribution to the running costs.Octavian wrote:Since TBL is a community project and our priority was, is and will be, not to have any money or advertisements involved, I will continue to support it: TBL never dies! The site is also thriving and more alive than ever, which is great.
In the future I will be providing a link to Octavian's PayPal account so that any user may make a contribution if they want to. This is entirely discretionary and will not result in any additional benefits for any user - it'll just help fund the running costs of the site. If TBL were to one day shut down then any donated money not spent on running costs will be donated to a charity. TBL will continue to run not for profit.
Finally, I just want to say a big thank you to Octavian. He has been so supportive of TBL over the past six years and continues to do so. Without him then TBL would not be where it is today - in fact we may never have existed.
. If you encounter strange things feel free to send me a PM!
That PayPal account would come handy 