Why is the donation target the amount it is?

We are looking to pay our hosting costs on a yearly basis, this allows us to concentrate on the site and not worry too much on whether we can afford the hosting on a monthly basis (it also gives us longer to save up, and a target to aim for).

We initially wanted to go for 1 extremely powerful server, however after testing several configurations, we found splitting the API server from the main server made a big difference to the performance of both, therefore we decided to try and get 2 decent powered servers instead.

In the dual server setup we will be able to have all the images and database on both servers, this will give us some redundancy in the event there is an issue with one of the servers.

We would really like to get the “best” setup detailed below, but the “Target” setup is what we are hoping to be able to achieve at the minimum, with the “minimum” setup being what we would be looking at should we fail to meet the target.

As you can see from the analytics images below, usage of both the API and website has increased a lot, the API has gone from 1.7 million hits this time last year to 18 million hits, the website stats don’t go back that far, but from April 10th – May 10th this year we were getting about about 17,000 visits to the site a month, now, just 7 months later, we are getting nearly 240,000 visits to the website a month.