[Brandon Martus]

One of the main problems this year is that I'm really busy (life, new house, side-projects, bands, work, etc.) compared to previous years, and being the only one working on keeping the site online, it's hard to get moved to a new server if I can't devote enough time to get it moved, online, working, tested and in better shape than it already is.

The individual donations and advertising are helping (and will continue to help) keep the site online with more possibility of upgrades than we have had in the past. Thanks to those who have donated and continue to donate.

We are talking now with our host about a quick upgrade before this weekend. I'm guessing it probably won't happen in time, and we will run into similar problems to what we had last year. It may be rough during kickoff, but hopefully they can give us some additional hardware to handle some of the heavy load we usually run into during the first few weeks of the season.

If they can do the upgrade, we'll work with them to make sure it is quick, painless .. and doesn't interfere with kickoff, post-kickoff, evenings, ship date, etc., etc. An announcement will be made on the portal if there will be any scheduled downtime.

As far as a dedicated server, Mike, you'll have to run all that through Mike Martus, Mike Aubry, etc. Making a move like that is not really my decision, in the end.

I'll work on a dynamic robots.txt to deny spiders during peak hours, so Google and Yahoo aren't spidering the site and taking up valuable resources. We may also have to deny guests and only allow logged in users, limited to 300 or so. All of this will have to be played by ear and will probably change as we go.

So, stay tuned. Suggestions, comments, and the like are welcomed.