Dear Bon Jovi fans,

Last ten days have indeed been a terrible ones. Unfortunately, I also have some bad news to report regarding the future of this site.

As you might be aware of, the online advertising market has basically crashed in the last 12 months and is not showing any significant signs of fast recovery. Ad revenue is a main income source for web sites and basically makes it possible for them to run. And while the ad prices have fallen sharply, hosting and server costs have remained the same.

drycounty.com experienced a very impressive growth in last 12 months. The site started july 2000 with around 20,000 unique visitors per month and ended july 2001 with impressive 60,000 unique visitors, around 200,000 visits and more than one million page views. But all these numbers also mean huge, and I need to emphasize again, huge bandwidth and server resources consumption and much much greater fixed monthly operating costs.

The site was able to live through 2001 with financial assistance from a major network of music fan sites - drycounty.com was in negotiations to be acquired by the network for almost a year. This deal that would ensure long term prosperity for the site now fell through and even worse, the network in question is going out of business, cutting all web hosting support for this site (any many other huge music fan sites).

All this puts the site in a difficult situation and there are basically two options: to shut it down or try to explore different ways of covering the site's operating costs. I have chosen the second option, but there are some things visitors should be aware of:

MOVE TO A NEW SERVER

The site will have to be moved to a new server. I will try to do everything to prevent any down-time, but it may also happen the site will be down for a day or two.
It will take about 3 days for the move to be completed and during that time, you will be redirected to an IP address of new server when you try to access the site. Just don't panic, that's completely normal.

The move will start tomorrow or on Friday.

MORE ADS ALL OVER THE SITE

Unfortunately, drycounty.com is forced to start running (annoying) pop-up ads to cover its operating costs. I am completely aware that these ads are not very user-friendy, but for now they are the only way to ensure the survival of the site and its future improvements. You have probably already experienced these ads at the site - they are currently being tested on some pages and will eventually expand all over the site, if they prove to be the a good way to cover the costs. Let's all hope the online advertising market will recover soon and that new, more user friendly ad types will be introduced (and actually used).

YOU CAN HELP AS WELL

You can make your own contribution to this site's revenue as well: by buying CDs, videos, DVD, books and posters at amazon.com, CDNOW and other merchants THROUGH the links from this site (located on the some page).

I hope your understand the situation and necessity of latest changes and will continue to use drycounty.com as your online Bon Jovi fan central.

Thanks for your time and understanding.

Peter
drycounty.com

Please send and comments to info@drycounty.com.>

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