During the past 24 hours we have witnessed a large influx of new users. Current stats show that Voat has been visited by 168,213 people in the last 24 hours alone, making 9,571,200 requests and burning through 117 GB of bandwidth. We are currently running at 300% our normal volume. You can see the spike very clearly here.
Because of this, we were forced to scale up our hardware to accommodate the new users, but this will incur significant costs which we won’t be able to cover without your help. Voat gets money primarily from your donations and ad-sales, but ad-sales have so far been unable to cover the expenses. In the past 24 hours, we have received $1,085 in donations and ad-orders through our store http://store.voat.co, and $180 through bitcoin. This is amazing and we sincerely thank you for every dollar you contribute to keep Voat online, but our past experience shows that donations and ads combined can no longer cover Voat hosting fees.
Voat also has a major flaw: we have no fulltime staff. Voat is currently managed by two people who have full time jobs “on the side”, which makes things very complicated. Voat needs fulltime staff to monitor the servers, respond to support and abuse emails, process donations and keep the wheels turning. With donations alone, this has not been possible so far, resulting in poor site performance and user experience.
We have all witnessed in one way or another how a website which takes on investors can slowly degrade and become outright unusable. Given our commitment to Freedom of Speech, we have to be very careful about who we partner with. Because of this, we have rejected several offers from investors who we believe would not be compatible with Voat’s core philosophy. For the record, we have had investment offers from all over the world during the past 2 years, many of which we were either too busy to entertain or too concerned with underlying motives of the parties involved.
So, what do we do?
We want to keep Voat alive. We want to be able to work full time on what we love and do best. We don’t want to change what Voat stands for or Voat’s core principles, and thus we need your help. If you have contacts or relationships with potential investors who also believe in and support our Freedom of Speech commitment, please let us know and please let them know that we need their help.
Until we have a permanent solution, we need you to donate, buy ads and merchandise (to be announced soon). Every bit helps.
Edit 1: typos
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HungryGhost ago
I'm flat broke (actually in an insurmountable amount of debt from student loans) so there is very little I can do to donate, other than maybe like $20 if I charge it on my credit card, but is there anything else I can do to help? This is one of the very few "conspiracy theories" that I've actually believed in but since I do believe in it I think it's fucked up the amount of censorship we come under. Reddit banned us but yet they literally let pedophiles and rapists have subs that they allow. That was honestly my major reality check that something wasn't right. I have papers and finals to write and study for but between the 22nd of december and probably about the 10th of April I can dedicate a large majority of my time. If anyone has any sketicism that I'm truly for the cause just message me and I'll send whatever proof you'd like. I don't have much to offer but what I have is yours. The man with the gun today was clearly a false flag which tells me that something real is going on and they're trying to discredit us. I came here from /r/pizzagate a few weeks ago and never expected such an amazing community. The amount of slandering that this site and /r/pizzagate face(s/d) tells me that something is going on.
edit: changed we to was