In the last 2 years, we have also put out some other free tools that are resource hogs (keyword suggestion tool, search engine script, geo visitors, coop ad network, web counter, etc.) plus some others that aren't so resource intensive.

The forum has seen amazing growth since it was started as well (this chart shows week to week growth in the number of new posts):

Please include your keyword tracker username, forum username and website URL/anchor in the Notes for the donation! Total Donations At: $63,172.15 USD Actual Equipment Cost (see below): $85,043.84 USD

We ran a fundraiser for new servers at the end of 2004, which yielded two very nice servers, and to be honest I thought we would never outgrow those servers. But amazingly enough, we have seen a 500% usage increase since the new servers were put in place about a year ago.

Currently digitalpoint.com is serving up roughly 1,000 dynamic (PHP) http hits per second 24/7 when you take into account things like the geo visitors tool and coop ad network (yes, that's one thousand hits per SECOND) and averaging over 1,500 SQL queries per second.

World's Most Expensive Digg

Update: Oh good... another front page digg for something in the forums took it down again briefly...

So here we are again... this time I'm looking at a Dell PowerEdge 1855 Blade Server setup. That 7U chassis can hold 10 blades/computers totalling 40 Xeon processor cores, 120GB RAM and 2.9TB of 15k rpm drive space.

This would allow us to setup some nice little web and database clusters.

Everything is redundant and hot-swappable (power supplies, fans, hard drives, etc.). Actually, the whole blade/computers are hot swappable for that matter.

This is what we are looking at right now:

• rack-mount form factor (7U)
• 20 dual core 64-bit Xeon processors (40 total cores)
• 2.9 TB of hot swappable 15k rpm disk space with hardware mirroring
• 120GB RAM
• dual gigabit Ethernet ports
• Running SuSE Linux Enterprise

Of course, it doesn't make good business sense to drop nearly $100k on new servers that are solely for tools and forum that are completely free. One option is to charge for tool usage (which isn't going to happen) and the other is to ask for donations to help cover the actual costs. Basically what it comes down to is if everyone that used the tools donated $0.25 (only once), the cost would be totally covered. Realistically, not everyone is going to donate, so for the ones that do, we are going to offer some extra things for them:

• $50 donation gives you the ability to change your user title in the forum

• $150 donation will also give you some added functionality on the tools:
  • Keyword suggestion tool has no image verification
  • Keyword tracker will automatically run a "check all" for your keywords (as long as you look at your account once a week)

• $500 donation will also give you some free advertising on this page (see "big donors" section)

• Of course any donation is welcome, even if it's just $1