Well, you guys have done it! You’ve successfully maxed out my shared web hosting account and brought my site to a standstill. For the past couple months it’s been moving at a sluggish crawl due to high traffic demands, but a couple days this week my RSS feed stopped responding altogether due to the number of simultaneous connections, according to my host’s tech support. I guess that’s a good problem to have. I still remember starting this blog a couple years ago because I was bored one night. At that time I figured nothing would come of it, but now a here it is pushing the limits of my entry-level web hosting account with over 16,000 visitors and 30 GB transfered every month.
In my commitment to continue providing youth ministry resources, ideas and information, I’m upgrading my hosting account to a VPS (Virtual Private Server), which should give me plenty of room to expand in the future while keeping the site quick and responsive. The transition may take a couple days, during which time this site may be unavailable or functioning incorrectly. There’s no need to unsubscribe or remove my feed from your RSS readers. Just hang tight while I transfer my site to a new web host and get it all set up.
Unfortunately, this is quite a financial jump for me, moving from $7 per month to $40 per month, a good chunk of cash for any youth pastor’s salary. I make all of my resources and ideas available for free and receive no financial compensation for any of it. In order to continue doing so, I would appreciate your support in two ways:
1. When you visit my site, be sure to check out some of the sponsors by clicking the ads posted here. Each time you do so, a couple pennies are tossed my way. It’s not much, but it ads up over time and it costs you nothing.
2. If you and your ministry have benefited from my site and you’re feeling extremely generous, use the PayPal button below to donate toward my hosting costs.
Donate to Tim to help cover some hosting costs.
I may also need to start placing advertisements in my RSS feed and email updates to keep up with the inflated hosting costs. I kinda don’t want to do this because I think it’s tacky and almost rude, but I also want the site to be self-supporting, so we’ll see what happens.
Either way, hang in there for a couple days while I move this site to a new host that can support us all. Thanks for your patience!
About me: I am married to my beautiful wife, 
From Ministry Questions.com...
May 31st, 2007 at 1:07 pm
You should try to put in the youth budget next year and see what happens.
May 31st, 2007 at 1:25 pm
I’ve noticed you have been a little constipated (the site that is:)
You could always just write for me – JJ
Actually that’s a really cool blessing that you are doing for other youth workers and I hope some can chip in since we all got youth budgets and there better be some money in that budget designated for resources.
Good Luck!
May 31st, 2007 at 1:42 pm
@ Mike: I’m actually working on the youth budget for next year right now (our church goes from July-June). I don’t think adding my personal blog expenses to the budget is gonna fly. Good idea, though.
@ Steve: I actually strongly considered moving to wordpress.com and using a hosted solution instead, but I have so many customizations for SEO and other things that I’d probably loose a lot of traffic. The freedom and flexibility of hosting it myself is worth the money, especially since I host several domains on my account.
May 31st, 2007 at 3:18 pm
wow Tim. You get a ton of traffic. I hope someday to get half of the traffic you get.
May 31st, 2007 at 3:53 pm
@ Chris: Most of my traffic comes from Google. I did a lot of research on SEO and did my best to make my blog as optimized as possible. Looks like it paid off, although I know it could still be a lot better.
May 31st, 2007 at 3:58 pm
tim still that is awesome. i will do my homework on it as well. i don’t think it could ever be as big as others but still i think i can offer some things maybe others can’t or in a way that others aren’t. that sounds arrogant but i feel like i could do something bigger with it. just got a program to add pdfs to my blog so that’s been pretty cool. now i can start posting some of my resources and see what happens.
May 31st, 2007 at 4:13 pm
@ Chris: Nah, that’s not arrogance. That’s what makes every site unique and necessary.