In the beginning, I was paying (the much more modest) bill out of pocket. The last few years it's been mostly through donations (some things I can't use PayPal for and have to use my credit card.) Most of the donations are made during periods of activity around the bill. There hasn't been much in the news lately, so we've basically run out.

My memory is shaky here, but we started with a $60/yr server (a YEAR!) and very quickly grew out of that. I've upgraded servers... three or four times. The last time that we hit insane traffic (remember the slow down of 2010?) we had no choice but to go to a beefier server (and do some optimizations on top of that) or turn all those visitors away.

This new server has been great, even during traffic spikes. However, right now we're at about 1/4th the largest traffic we've seen. The site would run almost as fast on a cheaper server.

It seems that our current hosting provider now has a feature to scale the server on demand. This is exactly what we need. So, I'll be moving to a $49 server as soon as I have a couple of days free.

A huge cost in the past has been sending newsletters. Sending just one newsletter to the entire list used to cost us $115. I also couldn't use PayPal for that, so that hurt my wallet a bit. Then I switched to a $79/mo monthly email plan which was cheaper for a while. I could pay using PayPal as well. I've long closed that account to save money, and we are basically newsletter-less for now.

Our list has doubled in size since the last time we sent out a newsletter. Sending just one newsletter now, using old ways, would cost us an insane $300.

All of these things can be addressed. For example, to send newsletters there is now Amazon SES. Sending to our list using SES would cost something like $5.

Performance of the site can also be improved, so we could use a cheaper server even when traffic spikes.

We also need to do something about spam, on the forum the mods are doing a good job, the rest of the site, however, is being mutilated by bots.

Unfortunately doing all this is weeks or months of work. Something that I simply can't afford to do right now. One option is open sourcing the site so other people can contribute to making it better. Even open sourcing the site will take a considerable amount of work, so this only makes sense if there are people here who are competent coders and are willing to put in the time. Are you out there?