The Cake Central community is growing rapidly, and with that grow it takes more and more hardware to provide all the features the community wants as reasonable speeds. Especially things like all the uploading and viewing of images can take a real toll on the servers when you have 80,000+ people trying to do it.

We opened the Cake Central Shop as a means to pay for these growing server costs but we run into a catch 22. As the server costs continue to rise, we have to do more and more business with the store to cover it. The more time we spend on the store, shipping packages and managing inventory, the less time we have to fix problems on the site and add new features.

So we have decided that accepting donations to help cover the growing hardware costs was the right step to take. We will not REQUIRE donations, nor will be solicit for them, other than a banner on the website. This just provides a way for members to help keep this community growing at their own discretion.

We will never move to a required membership format, the whole purpose of this community is to provide a free place to exchange ideas. Donations are voluntary and anonymous.

It is not a specific time period item, we will leave open the ability to make donations for as long as we feel it is the best way to help the community grow and develop.