User:Daniel Mayer/Sandbox
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The Wikimedia Foundation needs your help.
You may have noticed some recent slowdowns and even parts of some days that Wikipedia and her sister sites are not accessible. We are working on these issues, but traffic on the Wikimedia servers has been doubling about every 4 months and is projected to double again 4 months from now.
Just to keep up we must nearly double server capacity in about the same time period. For this quarter that means we will have to spend, at a minimum, $55,000 on new hardware (compared to $30,000 we had to minimally spend on hardware last quarter). This time, however, we want to do more. For the first time ever we want to actually buy more servers and supporting hardware than we absolutely need so we can have reserve capacity.
This ambitious expansion plan is possible due to a $40,000 grant from the Lounsbery Foundation. Instead of treating this like normal income, which it is not, we would like to use it to buy hardware we would not normally purchase. But we need your assistance to make this possible by helping us pay for other items in our budget, such as hosting (another expense that is growing exponentially) and other expenses required to keep the foundation running.
We are also almost at the point where we can start to accept hosting offers on a regular basis. More preparation and more hardware is needed before this can happen. These hosting partners will help us share the exponentially increasing traffic load and thus help curb future increases in the amount of money we need to ask you for. But we will still need to maintain and expand the server infrastructure we own.
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. Since then traffic on our servers has more than doubled so we know there are now many more potential donors. Every little bit helps - in fact the mass majority of all donations we receive are the equivalent of $20 or less.