Please visit this classic-audio sponsor
if you'd like to help support the site

How can I afford to do this for free?

This site, www.classic-audio.com, costs a considerable amount of money to maintain. There are over 200 megabytes of data online at this point, and the thousands of hits per day we get over the site's many pages amount to a great deal of bandwidth use. Then there are the domain name costs, DNS fees, the time it takes to update the site on a regular basis, and so on.

Some interesting statistics for you: As of January 2006, we've had about three million visitors, based on counting unique IP addresses. On average, each visitor views 5 pages per visit; we've served over fifteen million page views to actual visitors, not counting the thousands of times the site has been completely read from top to bottom by search engines, which happens about four times a day and in so doing, accounts for more than an additional three thousand web pages served every 24 hours... which has to be paid for just as if it were real people surfing around.

I wrote all the software that builds and maintains the site. The server is a fast Intel-based machine with several gigabytes of memory and a gigabit network connection. It runs a variety of Linux, and the web server used is a version of Apache. The site's active processing has been written in either Perl, Python, SQL or C, by me. Databases involved include both Microsoft Access and PostgreSQL.

All this taken together is lots and lots of complicated, busy stuff. So as you might imagine, the expenses really are significant - it amounts to an astonishing number of dollars each year for a site that is free to its users and offers all these resources.

Some of my costs are made up by donations. Donations can be made via PayPal, and if you'd like to help, just use the button below to contribute a buck, or whatever you feel is reasonable:

Contributors are listed on the home page of the site, so you'll get your name in lights, as it were. :)

As for the the majority of the rest of the site's expenses, as you might expect, they come "out of pocket." So the sites loses some money each month.

One thing you might consider as an alternate means of support is that if you're in need of some graphics software, I sell an application with many neat features called WinImages. A WinImages purchase directly helps this site; That's how I make a living. WinImages is like Photoshop, in a sense, although it can do many things that Photoshop cannot, and there are a few (just a few!) that Photoshop can do which WinImages cannot.

I appreciate whatever you can do to help, and if it is not within your means to assist, I understand and in that case, please consider the site a donation to you from myself and from those who have been able to help out..

Thanks for visiting!