You will be supporting Historic Railroad Preservation
You will be supporting Railfans everywhere
You will be supporting Model Railroaders
You will be supporting Railroad Awareness
You will be supporting the Huge Online ABPR Photo Archives
You will be supporting the Diverse Railfan.net Forum
How does Railfan.net Sponsorship support these interests?
I have always loved Trains and some of my earliest memories involve Trains
and Railroading. I started my personal rail web site shortly after starting
our ISP in 1995. I had tons of bandwidth and lots of storage space so why
not give something back to the RR and Railfan community which has provided
me with so much enjoyment over the years? As the site and the number of
visitors to it grew larger it started to become more of a network unto itself.
Enter Railfan.net, a "not intended for profit" vehicle for everyone to share
their love of Trains and Railroading with everyone else at no cost, to the
general public.
Railfan.net was started to allow preservationists and hobbyists to enjoy free
of charge webspace. Many of the railroad related websites on the internet were
severely crippled by a lack of web storage space or by extemely poor webserver
performance. As an ISP, we recognized this and thought that our tremendous
excess capacity could be the answer to a lot of prayers. It was the answer for
a lot of people, far beyond our expectations. Late in 1998 it became apparent
that Railfan.net's resource consumption had eclipsed that of our ISP business!
Some of the sites which Railfan.net sponsors have become incredibly popular
and consume prodigious amounts of data storage and internet bandwidth. To a
great extent the massive
alt.binaries.pictures.rail (ABPR) Photo Archives, at
881,660 photos
and growing daily, has proven to be a large drain on the ISP.
We had to make the very hard decision to discontinue our free webspace program
for railfans and historians. It was just costing us too much money and still
is! We have allowed all previously existing sites to remain online with us free
of charge so far, but economic realities may shut them down without your help.
The ABPR was costing us too much because many people had started to use
our web based archives in lieu of their regular new providers, in effect
"sucking us dry!" Rather than halt the ABPR archiving altogether, we decided
to delay monthly archive postings until the beginning of the following month in
order to reduce the financial impact on our ISP business.
Just browse through the links on our main
page and you can see how many wonderful railroad related websites
Railfan.net is paying for.
That's where you come in. With your help and the help of others like you, we
can continue to provide these great resources to the railfan community.
When we started offering free webspace it was hoped that we would attract
commercial sponsorship from the railroad, railfan and model railroad industry
which would help us offset the costs of providing the free web services to the
hobbyists and historians. That sponsorship never really materialized and
the ISP business simply cannot afford to pay the frieght for Railfan.net any
longer.
We've talked with a lot of people about how to raise the revenue to keep doing
what we've done so well thus far and the only practical solution is to solicit
individual and commercial sponsorship from people like you! We don't want to
jam obnoxious and off-topic banner ads and popups in your face all the time
and we just won't be reduced to doing that. We're a "pure" railfan network and
we don't think that type of horrid commercialism has a place here. We would
compromise for banners only in the case of Railfan and Rail Modeling related
businesses for which many railfans will bear a genuine interest.
Offer to pay for your own railroad related website
Offer a one time donation of any amount
Offer a donation for sponsorship link to your site from our main page
Offer to pay for a an existing free hosted site or a new Railfan.net site for someone else
Direct commercial entities to Railfan.net for website hosting services
Current Railfan.net Website Hosting Fees
Basic YourName.Railfan.net Website, 50MB Storage
$30 Per Quarter Year, $50 Per Half Year or $80 Yearly
Power YourName.Railfan.net Website, 100MB Storage
$45 Per Quarter, $75 Per Half Year or $120 Yearly
Basic YourName.com Domain Website, 50MB Storage
$45 Per Quarter, $75 Per Half Year or $120 Yearly
Power YourName.com Domain Website, 100MB Storage
$60 Per Quarter, $100 Per Half Year or $175 Yearly
NO SETUP CHARGE!
All websites come with PHP4, CGI and Server Side Include (SSI) capability, monthly
traffic statistics generation, unlimited local page counters
(in many RR typefaces!),
form mail CGI access, email alias forwarding, data backup, uninterruptable server
power supplies including an on-site generator, continous server uptime
monitoring and redundant internet backbone circuits. MySQL and SSL are available
upon request. Site data is backed up every three days at no extra charge.
On-site uninteruptible power supplies and backup generators ensure
maximum availability of sites.
Current Railfan.net Sponsorship Link Fees
Railfan.net Patron Sponsor
Image Banner Link on our main page Sponsor Area
Maximum image size is 200x50 pixels and 5KB filesize.
$80 Per Half Year or $150 Yearly
Railfan.net Supporting Sponsor
Standard Text Link on our main page under Independent Sponsors
$35 Per Half Year or $60 Yearly
Railfan.net Sponsor
Standard Text Link on our Links Page (donations NOT required for this!)
Any Donation Amount of $5 or Better!
Any and all donations gratefully accepted!
Checks should be made out to Blue Moon Internet Corp. and sent to:
Railfan.net C/O Blue Moon Internet Corp 319 Lincoln Pkwy Buffalo, NY 14216-3127You should include an email address for correspondence purposes and the specific services desired.
Correspondence via email should be directed to
Webmaster
(Be sure to replace " AT " with @ in your mailer)
Page last updated: Wednesday, 11-Jan-2023 02:50:51 EST
© 1995-2007 - The Railfan Network / Blue Moon Internet Corp