Thank You [10th July 2002]

We would like to thank our members for their continued support. In January 2002 StatCounter transferred to its own dedicated server in Texas, USA. It was a fantastic server, running freeBSD but it was beginning to show signs of reaching its limit. StatCounter could not be maintained on this server for much longer, and we could not afford to upgrade to a better server as it would result in an even greater net loss every month. So we scratched our heads. Got a lot of very good advice from some very helpful members at www.boards.ie and we managed to strike a deal with the best Irish Hosting Company www.hosting365.ie in our own country this time (Ireland). They offered us one beast of a server (DUAL PIII's, SCSI hard disk, 1024 megs of ram). Depending on how the load averages worked out, we estimate it could handle about 10 to 20 times the load of our last one. After some initial small, teething problems from the 1st July to the 9 July 2002, members may have been experiencing, various little annoyances, with logging in, signing up, or viewing their stats only resulting in errors. At no time was this affecting your statistics being recorded but it was a terrible nuisance. We aplogise, but it was unavoidable. To pop up, or not to pop up? We despise the use of pop-ups, we'll be getting rid of them as soon as we possibly can. In an ideal world, we would stop the pop ups appearing for members who were very generously clicking the ads on a daily basis as they are the life-blood of StatCounter. Unfortunately though this was not possible. And we are desperately trying to cover our costs. Unless anyone has a better idea on how we can generate more revenue to keep statcounter free, the pop-ups will be staying for at least a little while. With our improved hosting arrangment, and continued support from members in clicking the pop-ups and banners StatCounter will be almost breaking even for the month of August. Right now, the future for StatCounter is a whole lot brighter than it was during the last 6 months. And we have you the members and hosting365.ie to thank for that.