Wampum

Only twelve hours left!

In today's matching challenge grant. If we can raise another $310 in that time, an anonymous benefactor will match the amount, which means a mininum of $500 for the Awards.

I do want to take this time, however, to address some questions which have arisen in our comments as well as other bloggers who have kindly lobbied our cause this month.

Top on the list is the concern that, why, in this age of free or minimal cost Blog tech, does it cost us anything to hold the awards in the first place. The easy answer is simply "bandwidth", but to be honest, it's much more complicated than that. We can get cheap bandwidth, but the reason it's cheap is it's not particularly reliable, particularly during "bursts", like the 15K hits per hour we get when Atrios or Kos link to us during the awards. Thus, we've opted for dedicated bandwidth, which doesn't come cheap.

Of course, we could just set up with a really large pipe, such as provided by Blogger. We'd have no problem with load times. We would, however, be subject to the various glitches common to Blogger and Haloscan, such as the tendency to drop comments, sometimes in very large numbers. Since about 1/2 of Koufax nominations and voting occurs within comments, it seems as though we should make sure that part of the process is reliable. In addition, in light of last year's attempts to cast multiple votes, having a true window into the world of IP addresses visiting the site seems to now be necessary. In order to do all this, we have opted to not to be virtually hosted, a la Blogger/TypePad, but have a dedicated server which answers only to Eric.

These things together are our major costs, which we've estimated will run a minimum of $800/month for the three months the awards are in full swing, if traffic stays the same as last year. Since every year we've grown exponentially, this is probably a low-ball figure, but its the one we're going with at this point. There are other incidental costs, such as electricity. Not the actual watts necessary to power the computers, but the cost of opting for a campsite with electric hookups, versus the usual "rustic" National Park/Forest campgrounds we tend to utilize at a very low fee. In additon, our backup server needs a new harddrive, something we would generally put off until the regular one fails, since who cares if we're offline for a day or two during non-Koufax periods. But those are all secondary to the hosting costs.

We hope this gives our readers some insight as to why we're running this pledge drive. Please feel free to continue to ask questions or provide suggestions as to how to make the 2005 Koufax Awards the best ever.

Posted by MB Williams at October 14, 2005 11:52 AM