Over time, the web traffic hitting this site has scaled up immensely. In about a year and a half, the number of hits per month has gone from just a few thousand to nearly a million hits. In February 2003, there were 983,429 hits...and the numbers trend toward continued growth. Check out this usage summary graph:
Most of these hits are comprised of people viewing the digital photos from my builder's log. There are over 2700 images on this site as of March 1, 2003. Wow, right? Neato. Well, I'm flattered that this site gets so much traffic, and thanks so much to the hundreds of builders and prospective builders alike who have emailed kind words...but there's a down-side to all of this exposure. I have been running the web site off my home DSL connection, which is ill-equipped to handle so much "upstream" bandwidth (16.5 gigabytes for this site alone in February). It was driving my connectivity into the ground...and this is the connection I use to work, make a living, yadda yadda... So I finally caved in and moved all of this site's images to a separately hosted server. But now I'm shelling out a small amount of cash each month. The up-side is that this site should be immensely faster now that you're not trying to suck Aeroshell #5 through a cocktail straw.
Why am I babbling about this? Well, I'm about to cross a line here...
For a while I was thinking...don't worry about how slow the site is. Maybe being slow is a good thing. At some point I might offer to sell this entire site on CD-ROM, and the slowness would help sales! And in fact, if anybody is interested in having this site on CD-ROM, just let me know. I might go into "production" mode very soon (although I'd prefer to wait until the plane is airworthy and flying before I bother). But anyway, the slowness was really killing my ability to be productive. So I'm going with the high bandwidth hosting solution.
If you use this site regularly and find it useful, and you feel an overwhelming desire to contribute to the cause, and you don't think I'm a total schmuck for even mentioning this (I wouldn't be surprised if you do), then you can make a donation (securely using PayPal). Even if it's one dollar, it is much appreciated. It's not going to make or break the site, which I will keep up and running regardless, but it does help.
Thanks for your support!