I have been running the ADS for 2 years now and what a ride it has been. But as many of the regulars have noticed I am beginning to run into some difficulties that people like you might be able to help me with.

Rest assured I am not thinking of making this a pay site. Fansubs should always be free. But that doesn't mean I won't take a donation of equipment, tapes, or even money if you like. However, there are bigger problems that can not be solved by such donations. I am beginning to run into severe bandwidth limitations for one thing, and at the very least I would like to find someone one with the time to examine my log files for analysis.

As I said, I will never charge for access to my site. If the time comes that I can't afford the bandwidth of the main site I will just close it down, with the comfortable knowledge that at least I helped as many people as I could while it lasted. If you would like to help out, you must do it with the knowledge that you are helping others around the world find out about anime.

There are 2 large needs at the moment. If you feel you can help with ANY of them, please contact me at derik@pobox.com. Things are getting desparate.

1. More bandwidth - I used to be able to distribute up to 60 kb/s from my site. Now I am *lucky* to get 45 and the average is down to about 23 kB/s. This is changes at my end that I have no control over. I anticipate that the situation will get worse. I used to be able to serve 15 users, now I am restricting it to 7. This is because at the limited bandwidth that I have left it doesn't make sense to allow more people on. Still this means I deny access to hundreds of users each day. If you have a computer with a permannent connection to the net. And you can spare an average of at least 10-20 kB/s I would like for you to become a mirror of my site.

2. More HDD space - If any of you has some old SCSI HDD's that you would be willing to donate that would be of great help. right now the site occupies almost all of a 10 Gig HDD. I don't have much room to expand to since I need the main drive on my computer to compress files and for my own data. If I could get an alternate (mirror) site going I might resort to putting some files there and splitting the archive between two servers. But failing that, I need more HDD space to expand the site...

One special way to help would be to read the acknowledgments page and consider sending private thank you e-mails to some of the people there. These people help me to help you. Please let them know their efforts are appreciated so that they can continue to do what they have been doing.

Thanks for reading this. I don't intend to close this site down, but I am having trouble justifying the expansions that I would like to make.

Rudimentary examination of the log files would suggest that I distribute about 2.5 Gig per day. That corresponds to about 80 tapes worth of anime each month. Very few distributors on the net can claim such lofty numbers. And no distributor can claim the "instant" turn around time you get on my site (usually 2 weeks is considered very fast but most people can download stuff from my site in a matter of hours).

If it were up to me, I would like to double the number of files distributed on my site and double the bandwidth as well. There is certainly enough demand for it. If you would like to help, please please please send me an e-mail.

Derik
Administrator - The Anime Download Site (ADS)
derik@pobox.com