The following message has been posted to drupal.org, which is still down except for the main page:

Dear friends and supporters of Drupal,

Quite a few people have pointed out that drupal.org has been slow lately. We know it's been slow, and have been working on optimizing Drupal.org; adding new features to help keep (evil) crawlers out, fine tuning MySQL and Apache, etc. The fact remains that as the result of Drupal's growing popularity, the server is saturated pretty much all day. This explains drupal.org's poor performance.

To make a long story short, our current server doesn't cut it anymore. Our unprecedented growth in traffic requires more and better hardware. To buy a new server we need your help to raise $3000 USD. Read more about the details below, or just click the Paypal donation button on the right.

Where we are now

Currently, drupal.org runs on a shared server paid for and maintained by Kjartan. The server is a single Pentium Xeon 3Ghz with 1 GB of RAM. There are about 20 sites running on the server, including some of our sites like http://drupal.org/, http://drupaldocs.org/ and http://cvs.drupal.org/. In addition to the websites, the server hosts our mailing lists, mailing list archives and CVS repositories. Last month, drupal.org alone served more than 3 million pages for 100 Gb of traffic (this does not include any of the other sites or services; non Drupal websites, Drupal mailing list traffic, etc).

What we have planned

In the few past weeks we have been talking to the Open Source Lab (OSL) at Oregon State University and they generously offered to provide free rack space, free bandwidth, free power, free backup facilities and onsite support. Scott Kveton, Associate Director of the Open Source Lab, explains:

"The OSL currently hosts several open source projects such as Mozilla, Gentoo, Debian, Freenode and the Apache Software Foundation. The hosting we do is to help facilitate projects as they grow and leverage an economy of scale by hosting them all in the same facilities. The services hosted at the OSL currently touch well over 20 million unique visitors a day and growing at a phenomenal rate.

As part of the hosting we do here, we offer other services such as DNS, database, backups, mail relay etc to the community to free up their hardware to do the "main thing" for their project. We have offered up rack space, bandwidth, power and our "smart hands" service to the Drupal project because we want to help a great project that is having a significant community meeting one of our goals; enabling communities."

In order to take advantage of this generous offer, we need to supply our own server.

What we need to get there

We would like to buy a Dell PowerEdge 1850 1U (or equivalent hardware) with two Pentium 2.8Ghz Xeon CPUs, at least 2 GB RAM and two 70+ GB SCSI disks with a RAID controller. The total cost of such hardware is approximately $3000 USD ... and this is where we need your help . It is time for us to move to a new home.

Once we have collected enough money to buy a new server, we'll get it to OSL's data center, and we'll move the Drupal sites and services from the current server to the new server. At the same time, we hope to grow our team of server administrators, as well as extend the services we offer to the community. Things we plan to provide include a subversion mirror, an infrastructure for nightly tests, and so on.

How we are doing this

As many of you know, Drupal does not currently have a non-profit or foundation status. We are working on this and discussing with other large Open Source projects how they have handled it themselves. This will help in determining what will be best for us. No matter what we decide, filling out forms and filing paperwork will take time and money. Time we don't have.

Currently all funds are held by Dries so the equipment purchased will also be owned by Dries until we have an organization in place that can own equipment. The equipment and funds will then be transfered over. While we have some funds in the bank that have been used to pay for some marketing materials, we are hoping to use the majority of those funds we currently have to set up the foundation. In any case, it is not enough to purchase a server, which we need now. Until then, donations are not tax-deductable.

What you can do to help

Donate now! If you have ever considered donating, now is the time. Your contributions to a new dedicated server will help us lay a new foundation for current improvements and future expansion. It will gain us increased infrastructure support and monitoring. The opportunity to leverage OSL's services is just to good to pass up.

Your donation will be appreciated by the community and you will have everyones thanks for helping to keep us going.