Help Keep Fantasy-Faction Alive

Hi guys and girls,

Firstly: I hate these kinds of posts, but, in my defense, a number of our members over Twitter, Facebook and the forums asked for it and I’ve given in and admitted that I could probably use some help given the circumstances.

Basically, as you have probably noticed, Fantasy-Faction exceeded its bandwidth limits AGAIN this month. Last month we did it on the 28th, which meant we were only down for a couple of days. However, because yesterday it was only May 20th, if we were to just leave things, it would mean that Fantasy-Faction would have been offline for around 11 days. And, after speaking with a fair few of you over Twitter/Facebook, this is just too long for those of you (us) who need their (our) fantasy-fix.

So, initially, I expected perhaps these bandwidth issues were some kind of IT problem. But apparently it is just the fact that around 3,000 unique users are visiting Fantasy-Faction’s main site a day and that’s not even including the amount of people who use the forums (we tend to visit.. er… let’s just say multiple times a day :)). What this means is that the amount of data transfer is really, really high. Also, it’s probably worth saying that we are running quite close to our disk space limit due to the site’s WordPress & Forum databases being pretty damned huge too!

Now, don’t get me wrong – this is a good thing! An amazing thing! Well, unless you are the person who has to pay for the website. 😉 In all honestly, I’m not in the best position to be paying the kind of money that Fantasy-Faction takes to run at the moment. Certainly, I’m not broke – but I’m just about to buy my first house, which has left me pretty strapped for cash – who’d have thought you’d need to pay so many fees to so many people who do so little and buy as much ‘stuff’ as you do!?

Anyway, for those of you who would like to help Fantasy-Faction out, donations will be open for a week: there is a button on the top right of the page. Any donation means a great deal to me and also, I’m sure, to all the staff who write for us and the thousands of people who visit the site every day.

And, just to remind you what our amazing staff have created here:

– Over 860 articles (books, reviews, interviews – you name it!)
– A website that publishes a review/interview/article almost every day (gotta keep you coming back!)
– A website that attracts over 3000 unique hits daily (that’s about a million+ a year!)
– A forum with over 65,167 posts (with around 3,500 individual threads to read through!)

What I’m hoping is that once the anthology is done, we’ll be a bit more self-sustainable. We’ve had some pretty big issues with that – mainly the fact we had about ten times as many entries we expected (and therefore had to read ten times as many stories as we were expecting) and the entry plus element has also taken wayyyyyyyyy longer than we’d expected (because we really wanted to make sure we gave full and in depth feedback to those who requested it).

What I’ve done this month is paid for an extra 200GB as an add-on. What I’d like to do, if we can generate enough funds, is to upgrade our hosting package to a dedicated server (right now it is shared) and increase our bandwidth to 600GB a month so that we have no more issues. Then, with any luck, once the anthology is out later this year – we can use the money we make (hopefully – fingers crossed!!!) to move to a new, bigger, most cost-effective server. Well, that’s the dream.

Am I rambling now? Doh…I do that.

Thanks for your time – I’ll speak to you all in a week and let you know how we got on. 🙂

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