User:Daniel Mayer/Sandbox

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Knowledge is power. Help make it free.

You may have noticed recent slowdowns, and periods of downtime, for Wikipedia and her sister sites. We are working to make our system more efficient, but traffic on the Wikimedia servers is doubling every four months, and we currently serve over 30 million pages a day.

To keep up, we must double our server capacity in the same time period. For this quarter that means spending $55,000 on new hardware (compared to $30,000 last quarter). However, we want to do more: we want to finish setting up an infrastructure for deploying server clusters around the world. Hosting partners could then help us share our exponentially increasing traffic load, reducing constant increases in our expenses.

This ambitious expansion plan is made possible by a hardware grant from the Lounsbery Foundation. We are using this grant to buy additional machines we would not normally purchase. But to do this, we need your assistance to cover the rest of our budget, such as hosting (another exponentially-growing expense), short-term hardware needs, and other foundation expenses.

In all, we will need $75,000 in donations to reach our goals this quarter. You helped us raise over $50,000 in our last fund drive; I konw we can do this. Every little bit helps - the vast majority of all donations we receive are $20 or less.

Please help us continue to develop this valuable resource and make it available to everyone. Thank you for your generosity.