Please read this entire update before doing anything else. It is very important.
Starmen.Net is in big trouble. For the past 2 years or more, we have been very fortunate. After many bad web hosts, we finally found a good one, one where we could have a bunch of space, a ton of bandwidth, and other cool stuff. This let our site grow and prosper at an extremely swift rate. Most people won't believe it, but we get thousands of unique visitors each day. In terms of "hits" that most people like to measure stuff in, I'd say we're definitely in the 50,000+ per day. Impossible you say? I kid you not. The site you are at right now is the center of one of the finest game communities on the Internet. I'll leave the explanation why for another day, but I should just say that this level of awesuma comes at a great price. We knew it was going to happen someday, we just managed to keep putting off the inevitable. Yet the inevitable has come at last. Starmen.Net is just too big and too popular. The amount of file space, bandwidth, and CPU/memory resources we're using is mind-boggling. We're currently using about 50-60 GB of bandwidth each month, and that number continues to increase rapidly. File space has always been a big problem, we've constantly been just at the very edge of going over, and in a few instances we actually did go over. We've tried lots of things to keep file space usage down, like compressing all the fan art better, pruning the forums a lot (we earned back 20MB+ each prune, usually), and other things. Consider the fact that Starmen.Net is spread out on two different servers. We can't keep this up.
But it's not enough anymore. Our web host has given us notice that unless we come up with some sort of deal, Starmen.Net will be shut down within the week. To top it off, reidman's computer has just died. Fine timing, don't you think? What we've been paying $30 all this time will now cost us over $200 per month. There is no way we can afford that kind of money. And we're not naive enough to think we can get community members to consistantly donate money to keep us running.
So what is going to happen? We are currently looking at our options. There are too many things to consider, and I need to take time out to consider them all with a calm head, but I can see a couple main possibilities.
- One, we find a new web host that we can afford and move there. This will probably be hard. There are many hosts out there that tout awesome deals and stuff, but there aren't all that many that are completely trustworthy.
- Two, we bite the bullet and stay at our current host, but axe tons of our content until we can afford to stay here. Kind of a Starmen.Net Lite version.
- Three, we let Starmen.Net die and let people rebuild the community. I'm pretty sure you all know this will suck and unless you want freaky, stalker-type webmasters running the major EB sites, you probably don't want Starmen.Net to die.
So at the moment, we don't know what we're going to do. There's just too much to handle at the moment. Too many feelings of "This can't be happening" and "What are we going to do?" Plus some possibly bad stuff has just happened to me so I don't know if I can think calmly enough to make good decisions right now. I'm going to maybe wait a day and see what happens, maybe I can think of something. I of course would appreciate *helpful* feedback. I don't need any "You can't be serious" feedback.
What's going to happen to the petition you ask? It's hard to say. What I can foresee is that if we do somehow survive this thing, we'll pick up where we left off. If we can't make it, then we'll send the petition as we have it now. It would be a nice, appropriate final farewell.
Please listen. This is important. Do not start going crazy on the forums. The reason is that if the forums go crazy, we're even more likely to be shut down even sooner. I may have to shut the forums down if things get too insane. If you have ideas that you think can be useful, e-mail them to me, or post them on the forum. DO NOT post on the forum and start freaking out like the world is about to end. I beg of you, please don't make me shut the forums down 😞
Both I and the many staffer members here at Starmen.Net thank everybody in the community and all of the regular visitors who stay silently in the background for all of their support over the last 3 and a half years. I truly hope we can get through this ordeal like we have all the 5000 others we've had. I ask for your cooperation.
- Tomato
April 16, 2002 10:50pm EST