Now that I see your side of the story, I totally understand. Thanks for explaining it and thanks for being cool about it. Obviously, I am back, because I really really really missed this sight so much when I was gone. It is sooo cool, and I couldn't help wondering what I was missing. So thanks again, and I apologize.

Sincerely,
whtsup

First of all, Neatorama owes a lot to its readers, such as yourself, so thank you for coming to the blog (especially those who have been coming since August 2005 when Neatorama started).

I'm sorry to read that you won't be coming around anymore, and even sorrier to hear that the reason was not because of the content but because of the presence of advertising on the blog.

As you and other readers may have noticed, Neatorama recently went down twice for a prolonged period of time (and actually only twice since we began).

The first was when Neatorama was forced off a shared server because of its growing traffic and hence load on the server. I was forced to spend more money to move it to a VPS hosting plan.

The second time Neatorama went down was a few weeks afterwards, when it was forced off yet again from the VPS for overloading that server! I tried to cut down on the number of entries displayed, but that didn't work well as a solution.

The next step was a dedicated server, which is actually much, much more expensive. I didn't want to charge readers (who would pay anyways?) or beg for donations, so the solution was to add advertising to the blog to help defray the cost of hosting and bandwidth.

Finding the appropriate advertisers was actually also a challenge: I wanted no adult, alcohol, pop-under, pop-up, floating types of ads (and of course, those are the types of ads that pay the most!)

I hope I was able to find a happy balance between the needs of having advertisements and keeping the blog interesting to its readers.

I'm not complaining - actually, I was quite proud and happy of this little blog that could. I hope that you will change your mind and visit again.

I love your sight and have been coming here since last August. I have been out of town for a few days and was looking forward to coming home and browsing neatorama to see what was up. I am so disappointed to see that you are advertising on your sight. What is up with that? I always felt like this was the one place that I could go to on the web that was free of commercial influence. I could get away from Wal-mat and George Bush, but now here they both are! I feel like it's not the same and that you sold your self and your sight out. It used to be cool, but now, it's just ordinary. Sorry dude, but I won't be back.