I suppose some of you noticed our 14 hour outage Monday afternoon into early Tuesday morning. It seems the site is growing, which is a good thing. The bad news is that it’s starting to outgrow our hosting plan and our provider shut us down when some of the backend processes took up too much CPU time.

For now, we’ve turned off some of the backend jobs that cause this sort of slowdown; it’s nothing that should be noticeable from a user perspective. In the near future, we’ll be doing more streamlining and will have to postpone some of the upgrades we had planned until we’re sure they aren’t going to interfere with other users on the server.

In the long term, we’ll probably have to move the site to a dedicated server in order to avoid this sort of problem in the future and bring you some of the whiz bang features we’d like to have. Unfortunately, dedicated hosting isn’t cheap and the site doesn’t make nearly enough from ads to even consider that option.

No, this is not a lead in to tell you we’re about to start charging for access. The information we currently offer will remain completely free as long as we can afford to keep the site online.

However, we may start to add some services or features that require a membership in order to subsidize the cost of the services we currently provide. There is also the possibility of an ebook for offline use. These are some of the ideas we’re kicking around as we try and figure out how to keep the site online (and free!) for you.

This is a community site, so we’re asking the community for ideas. Are there any particular features you’d like to see that you feel are worth paying for? Do you actually want an ebook for offline access? Tell us what you think!