If you recollect very few people (except for some kind souls who kept the paid hosting going for a while) were willing to donate enough for 'proper' hosting
Whilst I sympathise, I think you may just have to accept that donations alone are unlikely to be able to maintain the cost of a dedicated UK server. I do know how much they cost and you will recall that I confirmed the figures in a previous post because I know this sites requirements. Donations from dsl based sites isnt profitable - again I can confirm this. I keep a record of each and every person that has donated for the full 12 years this site has been running (
here). There's been many a year when Ive funded out of my own pocket and one year I even had to borrow money from a friend to keep it going and another personal friend of mine donates to my hosting costs each year rather than buying me a birthday pressie.
For one database with 65 users then you are likely to be able to get away with low level cloud based hosting to cut costs. If push came to shove, then this forum alone would cope with cloud based hosting. The DB is pretty large as its been running a years. However, my problem is the main site whilst also contains some large DB's for things such as the adslchecker, my hits run into millions per week and tens of thousand of individual visitors, yet you can quite clearly see that donations never, ever cover my hosting costs. I just have to look at the site as an unpaid hobby for which I spend many hours per week (theres a lot of b/g stuff that you guys never get to see)... and unfortunately I cannot get away with cheap hosting.. and its also too big for me to run on my own without some help from my hosts (security and config issues) which is why I need decent UK support too.
I'm not alone here, BE dedicates his own time to produce hg612 modem_stats for nothing, same with Ronski for the GUI. Eric dedicates a lot of time to maintaining dlsstats and has to also pay for his hosting, for which he too gets nothing. John doesnt make any profit from routerstats.
You could try some other methods, I tried Amazon shop, but tbh that is a waste of time, because of the floor limit for min payment. I think Ive been using it for 8yrs and it was only 2 months ago I got my first ever payment when someone purchased some download videos. You use google already so try google ads, again this isnt always successful, I keep my ads as small as possible with none of the big banners which are supposed to bring more income, but a warning there. I find that because a lot of the frequent visitors to sites such as this are tech savy so tend to use ad blockers, so perhaps you could appeal to users to white list your site? It may bring in a couple of quid per month? Perhaps get a host to sponsor you?
I'm not trying to be pessimistic, Im just trying to state facts as they are and you're going to be very lucky if you think you can make any sort of profit from it. Like I say, Ive been running this site for 12/13yrs and have never personally made a single penny from it, everything gets ploughed back in. Its often a full time unpaid job, that costs me to run
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btw I want to stress that this isnt a hint at the regs to make donations for this site. I see the forums as a community and I greatly value the input of the regs with their time.