User:Daniel Mayer/Sandbox

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The Wikimedia Foundation needs your help.

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 4 months. Wikipedia currently serves over 80 million requests a day, and its traffic is projected to double again 4 months from now.

Just to keep up, we must double our server capacity in the same time period. For this quarter that means spending $55,000 on new hardware (compared to $30,000 last quarter). This time, however, we want to do more: we want to finish setting up an infrastructure suitable for deploying many server clusters (like the cluster hosted for free by our partner in Paris). This will help us share our exponentially increasing traffic load (we are currently getting hosting offers faster than we can accept them), and reduce our future dependence on fund drives. But more preparation and hardware are needed before this can happen.

This ambitious expansion plan is possible due to a generous hardware grant from the Lounsbery Foundation. We are using this grant to buy machines we would not normally purchase.

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.