Why Seawayfishing was offline and what it means for the future of this site.

As regular readers are no doubt aware Seawayfishing exceeded its allocated bandwidth on the evening of 20th may and subsequently the site's hosting company blocked all external access including mine.  Seawayfishing was created by me 2 years ago as a place to keep all my reports and data as well as let other anglers post theirs. It runs on a shoestring budget, the cheapest plan available(which is why sometimes during peak periods at night sometimes it wont load).  For a while now Seawayfishing has been growing exponentially with more readers and registered user's most of these are non active who read but don't contribute.  More users means more bandwidth usage and it has gotten to the point where it can no longer be supported on the current hosting plan it is on. That means it needs more money to continue.

Web sites are supported by one of 3 ways.

1. Advertising: The google ads you see running on the back pages contribute virtually nothing to the expenses of this site and I am not inclined to go out and get 'proper' advertisers who will pay decent rates. Especially as most tackle shops at the moment will be doing it tough like the rest of the country.
2. Donating:   Dontating money to a site usually doesn't work although it can raise a small amount initially, people usually don't willingly contribute money to a site they have been using for free.
3. Paid membership:  So far this looks like the only realistic option to get enough money to go forward. Although its likely most of you will just get pissed off about and it and leave never to return. At the moment I'm thinking of a small am0unt say $9.95 per year, active members(people posting reports) would get free membership for the first year.

So those are the choices I have, I'm not going to do anything straight away and I haven't decided what to do but I'll be keeping a close eye on the bandwidth usage this month and may institute changes if it gets close to the mark.  Being offline for so long willl have cut the users down a bit so we should have a bit of breathing room in that regard.   Feel free to discuss it below, but lets keep the righteous indignation to a minimum shall we.