Anyone who has a subscription already: Thank you. You've already done your part though. Please don't feel like you need to purchase an additional subscription.

This site gets around 75,000 unique visitors each day. Around 2 million for the month.  500 is less than 0.03% of 2 million. It would be a pretty sad commentary that to get to 500 people to subscribe to purchase hardware that everyone will benefit from takes existing subscribers to double-subscribe.

My basic view is straight forward: This site gives a lot to the community for free. If .03% of users who don't already have subscriptions who visit this site don't feel it's worth supporting in its hour of need then I figure we need to revisit the whole way the site is run. Make this a commercial site. Let the people who don't want to contribute anythign in any form go to other sites while they still last (think about it - if WinCustomize has trouble paying for servers when it's backed by a corporation for most of its costs, imagine what would happen if a million new users went to one of the existing skin sites). This site almost certainly uses more bandwidth than say Slashdot. It's expensive to run a skin site.

Look at some of these download stats from yesterday:

If you take the average size of one of these things to be say a megabyte, Just these 16 authors content required over 22,000 megabytes of bandwidth. And there are tens of thousands of skin authors.  Think about the bandwidth involved here. If users of these 16 top authors use over 600 GIGABYTES of bandwidth (that's 4.8 terrabits) that should give users a glimpse of how much bandwidth, hardware, IT work this site requires every day to exist.