Update: Many generous offers came in moments after this post went up. Thanks to some truly wonderful people, I think we’ll be fine after all!

Sparklette sees 5,000 unique visitors daily or 150,000 visitors monthly, and is a member of the 9rules premium blog network. It is a Google PR5 website and has been around since 2003.

I don’t normally ask for help over here. But this time it is urgent. I am looking for someone who is willing to host this website, Sparklette.net, for free in exchange for permanent advertising for his/her company.

Since March 2009, Sparklette has been hosted on a dedicated server with Site5. It’s a barter trade; they provide me with hosting, I provide them with advertising. That’s the big banner you see on the right and the link in the footer.

As the number of visitors to this website grew, the load on the server increased and at times, the website went down. To their credit, Site5 has always provided wonderful tech support during the downtime. But their server can’t support my high-traffic site anymore. The Site5 CEO contacted me about 12 days ago and asked me to upgrade to an expensive server which I can’t afford. He gave me 10 days to think about it.

In those 10 days, I made various adjustments to my site. To the tech-inclined, this includes reducing the number of database queries per page by more than half. I even signed up for a Content Delivery Network (CDN). Stephen from MaxCDN, very graciously offered his company’s CDN service for free in exchange for a tiny footer link.

These efforts paid off, because in those 10 days, the site didn’t go down once and load time improved tremendously. After 10 days, Site5 agreed that there is no need to upgrade my server. I was relieved.

Then came yesterday, the time of the week when everyone gets back to work and site traffic is the highest. My site went down twice for about 5 minutes each time. I monitor this using BinaryCanary. Not missing a beat, Site5 contacted me again and told me to pay a setup fee and upgrade to a USD135/month server or find a new host within 10 days. Just in time for Christmas!

At this present moment, there is no way I can afford to pay that amount to put this site on a dedicated server. Unfortunately that may mean that this site goes Poof! in 10 days. That is why I am asking here:

If you or you know of anyone who may be interested to host this website along with a few small project sites on a dedicated server, I would appreciate it very much if you would please contact me. In exchange I can offer permanent advertising for the hosting company.

Thank you for reading this. Sparklette needs all the help we can get. Please pass this on to anyone whom you think may be able to help.