Donate
You can donate to The Standard Trust account at Kiwibank.
Account: 38-9010-0427551-00
Set the Particulars to ‘Donation’
Since almost all of our readers are from New Zealand, this is a cost effective way to donate as little or as much as you like from your online accounts or even with a old school deposit at a Kiwibank.
There is a more detailed explanation below about what your donations pay for and our rules about acknowledgement.
In the past we have run this site using contributions largely from the sysop. Initially that was by providing servers for free through his own servers and those of donated server space from his contacts.
In early 2008 growth in the sites readership caused the server to be shifted to a paid virtual server in NZ. In early 2009 the server was moved to cheaper virtual servers in the US with higher capabilities to cope with site growth. These were paid for by the sysop as part of his contribution to the site.
In mid-2009 we added a Donate facility using a Paypal account. Contributions from readers grew from nothing to the point where they were paying for the majority of the cost of the servers by early 2010.
However, in early 2010 we had to shift to running the server on a dedicated server because the readership got too big and the demands on the server were violating the service agreements with providers. This also escalated the cost of running the server out of the range of the available donations. So advertising was introduced to pay for it.
However falling costs and a concerted effort to keep reducing them has resulted in a site that takes mere hundreds of dollars to run. At the same time maintaining advertising was returning less and causing too many issues. So all remaining paid advertising was removed in early 2015.
These days, we run the sites servers on whatever donations are received. But the servers are still run on the smell of an oily rag with no sponsorship and no affiliations to companies that may disrupt our opinions being heard. Currently (Feburary 2016), the operational costs for the site are about $280 per month. This is the cost of the server data transfers and counting in the costs for various ongoing software and services costs.
We provide no acknowledgement of people who contribute because that would violate our standards on privacy. If you make a contribution then only the sysop will know, and he doesn’t tell anyone anything that he considers should be private.
The money is placed directly into the account that is used to pay for the servers and their bandwidth and other costs. Your donation will only used for paying for the server costs. However it may free up other revenue to do other tasks like expanding the capabilities of the site, legal defences if that is ever required, and campaigns in the spirit of our about.
However we are eternally grateful to those who do contribute or have contributed in the past in amounts of between $10 and $200.
You help keep our options open about how this site is maintained and funded.
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