Hey people,
good thread Gee, Ive been working on this for a while and think it deserves its own mention and some stats for the people who think this site doesnt require much in bandwidth.
My feeling on the matter is simple - Paid members should be appreciated more than they currently are.
There was a concious decision to remove advertising from the site which in my opinion worked really well as it has made the site far more tidy than the old one. For those who want statistics... people just browsing this site every day are generating several GB's of traffic PER DAY. This site is very unique because the average visitor views 34+ pages per visit. That times the amount of visitors is a lot.
The amount of new visitors we have joining each day is putting even more strain on our host, it is almost time to move home again!
If we want to add more features we need an enterprise scale server and I dont want to upset anyone here or sound patronising but please, without any visability of the resource usage of this site, tell me how much the hosting should cost - You buy cheap you get cheap and this site is not going to remain the premier source for Starlet owners by being on some cheap ass host.
Over the following few weeks and months many new features are being selected and implemented along with merchandising of various forms. This will be a token of gratitude to our paying members and all I can say right now is that I only hope it encourages those who currently pay to re-subscribe and those who dont pay to see the value and become paid members because god knows we are going to need the cash.
So the challenge for us is to not alienate any non-paying members but give paying members the credit and features they deserve.
Lets not lose sight of the vision of this community - primarily we are a resource for EVERYONE and that will never change.
Thanks again for opening this thread Gee, we do want to recognise our supporters in a more obvious way.
Dylan