Greetings and Happy Holidays everyone...

We've been on our current server for many many years and it has been very stable. Unfortunately, technology has passed us by and the ol server is now obsolete to the point where software upgrades are being blocked because they do not support our old hardware. Many of these software upgrades we're missing out on involve significant security patches. Not getting the latest server software puts us at risk of being hacked. So, we need to upgrade servers at our hosting company.

The good news is we should see a performance improvement after the upgrade from the latest technology hardware, increased RAM and a data center more centeralized to the majority of our membership (Washington D.C.). And since we are upgrading within our hosting company, they are offering a 25% discount on the new server. In addition, they offer another 10% discount for pre-payment. Taking advantage of these discounts, our month to month server cost will actually go down from our current rates.

The bad news is that in order to get that 10% pre-pay discount, there will be a sizeable upfront cost of about $525.

If you've been around here a while, you'll know I VERY RARELY make a public request for donations. It's times like this however, where I gotta do a bit of fund raising to keep things going. I want to thank those of you who have contributed toward the site maintenance fund.. and especially to those who do so on a regular basis. 100% of those contributions have gone toward our operating costs these past 12 years. As a reminder, MonteCarloSS.com is a not-for-profit operation, with no banner ads, user fees or annoying google type ads. MonteCarloSS.com depends on user support to continue operations.

So please, if you are in a position to do so, click the 'DONATE' button in the right hand column and contribute what you can toward the site maintenance fund. Please indicate what your screen name is in the donation comments field.

A few more loose ends / bad news: The server switch will involve bringing the entire site down for a day or two. At this point I do not know when that will happen, but suffice to say it will be before the new year. I will make site-wide pre-announcments of this outage days before it happens.

Also, due to the server change, and the resulting heavy burden it will have on the site maintenance fund.. I'm going to have to delay ordering replacement website stickers. Hopefully that delay won't be too long.

PaulC