RE: New? LIT site.

[David Levine <David@InterWorld.com>]

>> 2) Your monetary help.  Requested only.  no pressure.  no special
>recognition either
>>    way.  Judging from the size of the mailing list, I would ask $10.00
>from each of 
>>    you to help with start-up costs.
>> 
>This may scare away some of us, especially these far away...
>
>
>> I hope to sell server space for 
>> $2.00/Megabyte/month and to sell ads.
>> 
>Do you mean ads will be displayed at the LIT pages?
>It has its advantages (e.g., possibility for sponsorships)
>and disadvantages (e.g., labelling the site as "commercial").
>
>-- Zenon


Yes, these were my two concerns as well.  Obviously, $10 is not a lot of
money... but I always wanted it to be totally free to everyone, just to sort
of "take the pressure off".  And while I'm not concerned with labelling the
site commercial (we could just call it a "sponsorship"... certainly we won't
be endorsing a certain brand of starship... corporate sponsorship really
can't affect the content of such a site) I don't know if LIT itself would
attract
any sponsorship... the number of hits is (while high for a science site)
depressingly low for commercial use.  However, Kevin has already told
me that even "if that [a high hit count] never happened, i would be pleased
as punch to have LIT at my web server."

The only other reason I may seem apprehensive about all this is that I
had a very very similar offer of help once before from a guy who was the
sysadmin for a major ISP in Chicago - we had our own domain name
(lunar.org), unlimited space, a helpful sysadmin, *fast* access times,
etc.  But eventually he ran into problems providing time and space, and
his bosses asked him to shut LIT down - - without warning, the web site
was inaccessable.  I could still log on, but ALL THE FILES WERE GONE.
Luckily, after much yelling he was able to return most of my stuff, which
I eventually got SunSITE to accept.... I know they're not going away.  Now
while I know Kevin has the best (BEST) intentions, and has no plans on
giving up on LIT... well, you see, I have to be careful and plan for future
contingencies, no matter how unlikely they seem now.