User:Daniel Mayer/Sandbox

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Knowledge is power. Help make it free.

You may have noticed recent slowdowns, and even periods when Wikipedia and her sister sites were not accessible. We are working to make our system more efficient, but traffic on the Wikimedia servers has been doubling every four months. Wikipedia.org is already one of the top 200 most popular websites on the Internet and will likely be in the top 100 well before the end of the year.

This growth has been very exciting but keeping up with it has been a challenge. For this quarter that means spending $55,000 on new hardware (compared to $30,000 last quarter) just to keep up with projected growth. This time, however, we want to do more: we want to finish setting up an infrastructure suitable for deploying many server clusters. Hosting partners will then be able to help us share our exponentially increasing traffic load, thus reducing future increases in the amount of money we need to ask you for. But more preparation and hardware are needed before this can happen.

This ambitious expansion plan is made possible by a generous hardware grant from the Lounsbery Foundation. We are using this grant to buy additional machines we would not normally purchase. But to do this, we need your assistance in helping us pay for other items in our budget, such as hosting (another expense that is growing exponentially), the hardware we must buy just to stay online and other items required to keep the foundation running.

In all, we will need $75,000 in donations to reach our goals this quarter. You helped us raise over $50,000 in our last fund drive. Every little bit helps - the vast majority of all donations we receive are $20 or less.

Please help us make this a valuable resource that will continue to be available to everyone. Thank you for your generosity.