The time has come to shed some pride, and summon some courage in asking from the entire BeOS Community for much needed financial help.

I have tried to forestall this as long as I can, have tried to raise monies myself quietly and through the help of several close friends, but I have to admit now that if I don't ask for help from the community at large now, things are going to change for the worse in regards to the hosting situation for The BeOSJournal.

Here's how it stands now: I currently own two domains for The BeOSJournal's use, namely beosjournal.org and beosjournal.net. The .org domain is hosted with CompleXero, who all along have allowed the site to be hosted for free, in exchange for a small banner ad at the bottom of the front page. A really great deal so far, but free only goes so far.

The .net domain has been hosted for several months with Hurricane Electric, whom I've arranged to have hosting fees paid for through a paypal account, and with the help of some friends. The .net domain was initially meant to serve as a backup domain, in case something was to happen with the .org domain. Now that my php skillz have improved, I'm seriously thinking of creating more synergy between the two "sites". We'll see in time.

For the past several months, the .org domain has suffered numerous outages, loss of service, slow service, and even unexplained dropping of subdomains, mailing lists, and email accounts. I understand that it is a hard thing to manage a hosting company, and I do not disparage Mike @ CompleXero for handling the services thus far. He's a great guy, and I truly appreciate all that he's done for us at TBJ. Thank you Mike. From the bottom of my heart, I mean it.

That being said, I would still like to either:

a.) arrange payment for his services, and upgrade our account.
b.) move to a more stable host.

Since the last time I posted about this issue, I've received quite a few offers, kind emails, words of advice, and so forth. The most serious offer I'm considering is by David Reid, whom you will know is a serious BeOS Developer, and has been a long time member of the BeOS Community.

Basically his offer boils down to $525 per year for hosting the .org domain, given the fact that I asked him for some serious bandwidth requirements, space concerns, and other things I've wanted to have for our site. We have plans, see... ;)

I think his offer is reasonable, but again, I'm stuck. Stay with free hosting, or spend some money, and get better hosting? Either way, I must raise some money to pay for our .net domain too. It's currently running at $9.95 / month, which is more than adequate for the needs of simply hosting a backup server, for the moment.

Here's my question to you, the reader. If I present a paypal account, and/or a means to allow you to send us money, would you be so kind as to send some our way? Even a few dollars per person would certainly helps things. We will present a fund indicator on our front page too, so everyone knows how much has been raised, and how much is left to go to our target.

Target. In my mind, I would like to raise $1000 euro, to be comfortable, so as to take care of the immediate hosting/switching fees, future growth, and domain renewals.

I'm going to watch and post in the forum here. Please post your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and so forth.

From the entire staff @ The BeOSJournal I say a huge Thank You.

Sincerely,
Chris Simmons.