Where your donation goes...
Most people would probably be
surprised to find out how much it actually costs to run a website and registry
such as this – significantly more than your average personal website. The costs to run
the website and registry can vary a great deal from year to year depending on a
number of factors / needs and can be broken down into two different categories -
website-related costs and non-website-related costs.
Website-related expenditures
include website hosting, domain name renewal, message board software and other
website-related software costs. These costs alone from the
site's creation in March 1996 to now have totaled over $10,000 (which is
actually very cheap for the size of our web site and the number of visitors we
have). We
have used all of the donations received thus far
to offset these costs which still results in several thousands of dollars of out-of-pocket
website-related costs for us. Our
goal is to continue using the donations we receive to pay for website related
costs in an effort to make the website as self-supporting as possible (we
obviously have a ways to go on this).
The registry / website has
experienced many growing pains over the years, mainly due to the lack of money
to upgrade our web hosting and software in order to keep up with our growing
number of visitors. Our web site (with all of the pictures, information,
message board files, registration database, etc.) currently consumes
a large amount of server space and we continue to gain more and more
visitors. Currently, we're averaging around 20,000 unique visitors, over
2,300,000 hits and over 16 GB of bandwidth transfers on the website per
month. Our website's growth can also be seen on the message board, which
has steadily increased from only a few hundred members in May 2001 to over 3000
registered members currently. As the website continues to
grow in size and in the number of daily visitors and hits, expenses will continue to climb
higher as we will need more robust web hosting and will need to purchase
additional software to continue automating as much of the website as much as
possible.
The other type of expenses we
have are non-website-related costs. We are different than your
average Mustang enthusiast website in that our website is actually somewhat secondary to
what we do. As a registry, there are a lot of things we do behind
the scenes that other Mustang websites don't. The registry was
originally created back in 1994 with the primary purpose of gathering
information and data from 1982-1993 Mustang GT's which means we do a lot of work
that most people don't actually see. A great deal of our time is spent
programming, managing and adding to our 5,000+ car database, doing GT-related
research and continually
adding to our collection of GT-related reference photos and materials. Of
course, with these tasks come major and not-so-major expenses for things
such as reference materials, software, new computer hardware & upgrades, other
supplies, registry-related phone bills, postage, etc. On average, these other non-website-related costs such as those mentioned
above have totaled to around $2000 per year – all paid for out of our pocket (none were
paid for from donations received).
As noted above, costs to run the
registry can vary a great deal from year to year depending on things such as
whether we need to upgrade or purchase new computer hardware or software,
upgrade our web hosting, or if we do something out of the ordinary such as have
a registry "get together" like the 40th Mustang
Anniversary MCA show in April 2004. One major registry-related
expense we've had over the last few years (out of our own pockets) was the purchase of a new notebook computer
to be used solely for registry purposes. The purchase of this computer has
enabled us to make a great deal of progress lately on the registry since, prior
to this, our family was sharing one home computer between the four of us which
meant the time we had to spend on registry-related tasks was quite
limited. Since our family is also "on-the-go" a lot, the
portability of the notebook also makes it much easier to find time to work on
the registry.
Since 2001, we have also
received a very, very small amount of money from our affiliate vendor links (such as Amazon.com,
Tire Rack, 
Carfax, Ebay , Eastwood Company , Parts America , Restore
Mustangs ,
etc.) and GT
Registry merchandise sales in addition to donations. Unlike
many other sites, we have made a point to avoid pop-up ads and other shady
revenue builders, choosing instead to only allow advertisers who offer something
directly related to 1982-1993 Mustang GT's. We
would like to thank those of you who have made purchases from these links - we
really appreciate it! Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing who has
helped us out in these areas as the vendors do not let us know who has ordered
from them. As mentioned, this has generated a VERY small amount of money
and it has been used for partially offsetting non-website related expenses.
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and we still run this registry and website as a
"hobby", we have really struggled at times to
come up with the funds to pay the on-going expenses
required to keep the registry moving forward.