Week 3: the final stretch!

Protip: Paypal takes both a flat and percentage fee from each transaction, so a pledge of $1 gets knocked down to $0.67, whereas more than 95% of a $20 donation ends up going toward the hosting costs. For the time being, I’ll pay the fees myself, but, if you can give more than a dollar or two, a significantly greater percentage of it will go to Dress to Impress itself. Thanks!

I’ve started moving to the new server, and I’m really excited about it :) As such, those who donate to help pay Dress to Impress’s hosting bill will get early access to the beta server, which has the most-requested feature to date, outfit saving! (I spent almost all my free time on building that feature over the course of this week, so I really hope you like it :D)

I’d imagine that a pledge of about $5-$15 is reasonable, depending on how much you use the site, but even those who give just one cent are in for the beta testing, too.

Just make your pledge here, and I’ll contact you within 24 hours with instructions to access the new server. Then y’all can help me test out the new version of the site, find bugs, tell me what you think of the outfit saving features (I’m excited!), and simply enjoy yourself overall ;)

Those who have already donated will be receiving their e-mails by the end of the night.

Thanks, all!

Dress to Impress is growing up! It’s been about 9 months since Impress went live as a pet project on my personal web space, and it has, amazingly, begun to outgrow the resources it currently has. As such, in order to keep as much uptime as possible and gain more control over how future features are implemented, Dress to Impress is getting ready to move to a dedicated web host. Exciting!

Part of what Dress to Impress does is save you NC by showing you what works and what doesn’t before you waste your money. I’d really appreciate it if you could pass over a Mystery Capsule or Power Bounce or two to help give back to Dress to Impress and give it the opportunity to expand.

The current goal is to move to Linode’s 512 plan. Linode is a fantastic company that offers great resources and support for the price, which, in this case, is about $20 a month. Rest assured, choosing a hosting provider is something I take very seriously. I have worked with Linode in the past, and am confident that they will do well with a site that, by its very nature, can be a heavy load.

I’m hoping to be able to raise $250 to cover one year’s entire cost for domain registration and dedicated hosting. Given the thousands of users who access Dress to Impress regularly, this seems like it should be a snap.

How much do you spend on Neocash on a regular basis? Please consider putting some of that pocket cash toward Dress to Impress to keep us running. I promise that all funds raised here will go exclusively toward Dress to Impress’s hosting costs, and any overflow will be held for future hosting bills and possible expansion, to keep both this project and possibly future Neopets projects alive and well.

Thanks for using Dress to Impress! I’m amazed at how popular the site has become in less than a year, and I look forward to making DTI even better as time goes on.

You da best!
—Matchu

P.S. Try to put your username in the box when it asks if you have any instructions for me, so that I can get you in on the beta testing as quickly as possible. Thanks!