WinCustomize Subscription Drive: Status
Wednesday, December 10, 2003 by Frogboy | Discussion: WinCustomize News
Just a recap - in the past 30 days we've had two primary servers crash due to hardware failure. We are in the process of trying to purchase 2 new servers along with prepare the way for additional servers to help provide redundancy.
All we need are 500 new subscribers by the end of the month. As I type this, we have 156. Each month, over two MILLION people visit this site. The costs for running this site are considerable. While Stardock pays for most of the bandwidth and IT work, WinCustomize has to pay for its own machines.
We need your help. In the next 20 days or so, we need to get another 350 subscribers. Even as I type this message, there are 1,178 people on this site. If you've already subscribed, we thank you. If you haven't, please consider purchasing a premium subscription.
Premium subscriptions not only give you unlimited bandwidth to the site, you get access to the WinCustomize Browser which provides a direct link to WC's database. Premium subscriptions last TWO years and only cost $19.95. This Spring, a host of cool new features will be added to WinCustomize that will only be available to subscribers. Two premium skin suites are already available for WinCustomize premium subscribers and a system tray program that monitors WinCustomize for new skins, themes, wallpapers, and more is also available.
To subscribe you can follow the link below or go here: https://www.wincustomize.com/store/
Reply #2 Wednesday, December 10, 2003 8:34 AM
having said that, if you havent got a subscription and visit a lot, go on, get one! it really is worth it
Reply #3 Wednesday, December 10, 2003 11:25 AM
Reply #4 Wednesday, December 10, 2003 11:52 AM
Reply #5 Wednesday, December 10, 2003 12:42 PM
Reply #6 Wednesday, December 10, 2003 1:26 PM
Anyone who has a subscription already: Thank you. You've already done your part though. Please don't feel like you need to purchase an additional subscription.
This site gets around 75,000 unique visitors each day. Around 2 million for the month. 500 is less than 0.03% of 2 million. It would be a pretty sad commentary that to get to 500 people to subscribe to purchase hardware that everyone will benefit from takes existing subscribers to double-subscribe.
My basic view is straight forward: This site gives a lot to the community for free. If .03% of users who don't already have subscriptions who visit this site don't feel it's worth supporting in its hour of need then I figure we need to revisit the whole way the site is run. Make this a commercial site. Let the people who don't want to contribute anythign in any form go to other sites while they still last (think about it - if WinCustomize has trouble paying for servers when it's backed by a corporation for most of its costs, imagine what would happen if a million new users went to one of the existing skin sites). This site almost certainly uses more bandwidth than say Slashdot. It's expensive to run a skin site.
Look at some of these download stats from yesterday:
| Visual styles | Downloads Yesterday | WC DL |
| 1. mormegil | 3137 | 303 |
| 2. adni18 | 2415 | 276 |
| 3. BoXXi | 1152 | 140 |
| 4. Judge | 1049 | 182 |
| 5. Xav73 | 1007 | 42 |
| Wallpapers | Downloads Yesterday | WC DL |
| 1. adni18 | 1951 | 217 |
| 2. mormegil | 1118 | 146 |
| 3. BoXXi | 665 | 84 |
| 4. Jairo Boudewyn | 638 | 74 |
| 5. The Bussi | 557 | 96 |
| Icon Packages | Downloads Yesterday | WC DL |
| 1. mormegil | 2513 | 244 |
| 2. adni18 | 1266 | 163 |
| 3. yangge | 749 | 45 |
| 4. Lipiani | 373 | 27 |
| 5. Leo the Lion | 351 | 24 |
| WMP | Downloads Yesterday | WC DL |
| 1. The Skins Factory | 2831 | 61 |
If you take the average size of one of these things to be say a megabyte, Just these 16 authors content required over 22,000 megabytes of bandwidth. And there are tens of thousands of skin authors. Think about the bandwidth involved here. If users of these 16 top authors use over 600 GIGABYTES of bandwidth (that's 4.8 terrabits) that should give users a glimpse of how much bandwidth, hardware, IT work this site requires every day to exist.
Reply #7 Wednesday, December 10, 2003 3:07 PM
Thanks
Reply #8 Wednesday, December 10, 2003 6:22 PM
Reply #9 Wednesday, December 10, 2003 6:41 PM
If you didn't yet and enjoy this site, do it! I'm looking forward to the new features coming down the road.
Reply #10 Wednesday, December 10, 2003 7:34 PM
My subscription is not due for renewing until around april 2004, I had planned on doing it closer to that time. If it will help I'll renew it now and will do so as soon as I see a reply from you. I enjoy the stuff stardock produces but without you guys their programs would be nothing so keep up the good work.
Reply #11 Wednesday, December 10, 2003 10:01 PM
Reply #12 Thursday, December 11, 2003 11:47 AM
Cheers,
Bob Cronin
Reply #13 Thursday, December 11, 2003 7:54 PM
Reply #14 Sunday, December 14, 2003 9:08 PM
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Reply #1 Wednesday, December 10, 2003 1:59 AM
Anyway to help the drive it would be, or would have been great, to have a new premium skin or even suite made to help motivate new subscribers. Just a thought.