[Foundation-l] Lost money

Thu Apr 20 05:24:20 UTC 2006

On 19/04/06, Jakob Voss <jakob.voss at nichtich.de> wrote:
> Uhm, the problem that people may like to donate when servers are down
> but cannot do so when servers are down is known for ... years? Why is
> wikimediafoundation.org still hosted at Wikimedia's own server
> farm? It's only a small website isn't it? I bet the costs of moving to a
> reliable, independent webhoster will easily pay off.

As Brion said, we used to have an "offsite" donation page, which
worked for a while then Wikipedia grew so big that even the tiniest
downtime would overload almost any outside site we linked to. We had
to remove both the offsite donation page and the offsite status page
from the error page because our error-spawned traffic was crushing
their servers.

On 20/04/06, Walter Vermeir <walter at wikipedia.be> wrote:
> Is it really necessary to provide the normal donation form? Just put on
> the error-page itself ( PayPal: donation at wikipedia.org ) and if that is
> possible make from the email address a link to the website of PayPal to
> a page where the can donate to the Wikimedia Foundation.

That could work. Then all we'd have to do is shut down the servers
once a week and we'd get enough revenue to feed a large African
country. ;)

~Mark Ryan