I myself personally am not too bothered about the speed but I can imagine it's quite frustrating for the people that visit the site at the busiest times of day and a few people have complained about it. The problem is processor power and RAM when alot of users are online at the same time. I wasn't expecting much response to be honest so I thought I would throw it out there and see what the reaction was from everyone.

As much as I know google ads would bring in some dosh, I really do not want to tarnish the website with crappy ads as we have always tried to steer clear of them.

Unfortunately no one will get any "FTP access" or anything as donations are simply that, a donation. Sorry about that.

It seems to be having a better response than I thought it would so perhaps I will look into how much an upgraded server would cost us, it's currently in the region of $90 a month but to be realistic and for the donation idea to work properly, we would need to accumulate enough to run the site for a year because we cannot guarantee that the donations will come in every month and it would end up falling on me to cover the cost which I simply cant afford.

I'll run this poll for a week or so and see what the situation is then perhaps i'll set up a donation box with a target cost for an upgraded server for a year. It wouldn't need to be anything in the extremes of $100 donations if everyone chipped in a small amount and I'm sure between the staff we can come up with some kind of reward for your kindness, maybe the 1up mushrooms you've always wanted?

I will also look into a few ideas I've been having about improving the download section load times as I think that is where alot of the load is coming from.

Watch this space...