Literary treasure needs new home

The Internet Speculative Fiction Database -- a kind of IMDB for science fiction and fantasy -- is in trouble with its ISP over its high traffic and needs a new home. This is a critical literary Internet resource, and it would be tragic if it went offline. Someone, please help these folks out with a good hosting hookup.

On Jan 17 2003, your-site.com pulled the plug on ISFDB cgi scripts. This means that database searches are no longer functional. Rationale was that there were too many daily database queries (which exceeded your-site's limit of roughly 3000 per day), and the ISFDB was generating a system load beyond their specified per-account limits.

I think that at this point the ISFDB has reached an awkward point for a non-profit site: it's too large (in size, bandwidth, processes, and system resources) to run at a typical ISP. Renting an allocated server would cost in the neighborhood of $200 a month (a considerable step up from the current $5). Buying a server and colocating it at an ISP is cheaper, but would still run in the neighborhood of $100 a month. In general, sites with low resource needs are very cheap, and sites with high resource needs are very expensive. There isn't a lot of middle ground. Even SFSite is feeling the pinch. They're being required to pay for the bandwidth used, and the ISFDB share for that would have been in the neighborhood of $80 a month. Hence our original move away from SFSite.

Link Discuss (Thanks, Lawrence!)