Jim [Boehner], thanks for your comments. Your concerns about the potential downsides of hosting the website on internal servers are shared by IT staff, principally the matter of 24/7 support. However, at the time the 2011 Plan was being assembled this appeared to be the best way to address the performance issue. To quote from the Capital Acquisition section of the Plan that we presented to A&F prior to its November 20 meeting and that Barry Shelley sent to ODV on December 2: _____ C. Servers of ARRL Web Site The ARRL website is presently hosted in the Rackspace cloud, sharing server resources with other Rackspace customers. This was done when we discovered late in the process of deploying the new site that the system requires many more processors than anticipated -- more than can be provided in a single server. However, in the cloud we are sharing resources with other cloud users, and the site's performance suffers because of this. We considered getting additional leased servers at Rackspace or another provider but concluded it would be more cost-effective and more manageable to move the site back to HQ. (HQ Internet connectivity was upgraded substantially this year, making this move feasible.) We are requesting the addition of four small server-grade machines. The requested machines, which have multi-core processors but not much in the way of disk storage or memory, are to be used to service Web-page requests under the guidance of a master server. This is the same configuration as the present cloud-based system, but the hardware will be fully dedicated to the Web site, providing higher performance, and the backing database will be run on optimized SAN storage, substantially ameliorating one of the main bottlenecks of the present site. Each of the servers costs $1,500, amounting to a total of $6,000. _____ Since this was written, Rackspace has announced a new service that Jon thinks MIGHT be a better answer but he has to do more research before he can be sure. There is no question but that the site was busy over the weekend. On a typical weekend the Web store handles 50-75 orders. After a typical Friday email promoting publications we get about 200 orders. This past weekend, in response to a $5 flat rate shipping offer the Web store received nearly 350 orders. Dave K1ZZ