Uh-oh, he's going to beg.

Well, no, not exactly. But at almost 26,000 poems, over 180,000 comments, and 119,000 forum posts the site hit critical mass. My shared webhost has suspended the database — this week it started to really bog down their server.

That's not the whole story, of course — it doesn't help that I wrote the code for the backend in high school (just about six years ago) and haven't really cleaned it up since.

But the fact is that for the site to continue in its current form I'm going to need to switch servers/hosts. This will take a few days and a bit of an investment (hosting may go from $10 to as much as $50 a month or more).

There are about 350 of you who visit regularly, give or take (that 412 figure probably includes a host of duplicate accounts). If you could donate a few dollars to help offset the hosting costs (and my time investment over the years), that'd be great. No obligation, of course: the site is coming back, one way or another. And please, don't donate again if you've already donated (you've been generous enough!), and don't donate more than you can easily spare.

So that's it. Thanks, everyone! I'll keep you posted of my progress getting the site back up and running.

— Donald