Urgent: Serious Business Calls for 50$ in Donations or ZI Goes Poof

I had always hoped to never need to do anything like this again, but desperate times call for desperate measures. You guys remember when the site was basically offline for half of February due to bill issues? Well, I am happy to say we have resolved those issues from back then. However, it doesn’t change the fact we only made about half of what we usually did in February because we were offline. For those unaware, we get our ad payments 2 months after the money is made – so half of February missing means half the income, which meant we were severely short this month.

While I forced my bank account to go negative (and it may take me awhile to get out of it) to get the big bill out of the way, our DNS servers and such (which are required for the site to be online) are on a seperate billing statement. It amounts to roughly 46$ in bills, but given that paypal likes to take a bit of the money at times, I figured it was best to just aim for 50$ and call it good. You know if the donation post is made, it means we are days away from going offline – in this case two days to be precise. We need the money ASAP to avoid future downtime.

Rest assured that this isn’t a sign of “omg ZI doesn’t have good financing”, and more of “we saw this coming two months ago, but Nate’s job at Mcdonalds doesn’t afford him extra cash”. I was hoping one of next months payments would arrive early, but it didn’t happen. Don’t get use to this folks, and thanks to all that donate. Any donation greater than 20$ and we’ll actually pay you back with a nice 2$ tip by the end of June. See, think of it like a really bad investment with a small payout.

Update: A big thanks goes out to Chris Dunford, who donated the entire 50$ needed. We will still accept donations over that amount and all donations will be banked for a contest prizes. If the total donation money exceeds 500$ in the end, we’ll naturally be donating to a charity. Likely for Cancer and/or Child’s Play.