Donating to Neowin

Neowin is a "free to use" website that also offers subscriptions for enhanced service at a small annual (non recurring) cost. Our main source of income comes directly from advertising that is placed as unobtrusively as possible in the pages. There are many discussions on the ethics of advertising in our forums, and the blocking of such advertising. Some members have suggested we add a way to donate to Neowin in addition to the two subscription packages we offer. Any donations go towards paying news reporters, attending (tech) events and general running costs of the site. Below you can see the hardware we have purchased over the years.

If you feel that the service we offer is of value to you, you may choose to donate any amount to our PayPal account and then post here to get yourself added to the list of previous donors.

We also have a mail address should you wish to donate but don't want to use PayPal:

Neowin LLC
K Kolaz, Accounting
15090 Beck Road
Suite 300
Plymouth, Michigan 48170
United States of America

Please mark any checks clearly with your member name and id and any message you want included in the donations thread.

About Neowin

Neowin.net, launched in October 2000 by Steven Parker & Marcel Klum, is a technology news website that actively focuses on Windows, PCs, Mac and Linux. Neowin runs under the slogan "Where unprofessional journalism looks better."

While Neowin does not employ full time professional journalists, we offer both community and staff members to try their hand at submitting articles to our news system. Staff are paid on merit for their original stories up to $15 per article, based on amount of views, amount of comments and how far the article was picked up by other websites. Registered members are only ever approached by Neowin staff after significant (original and correctly formatted) contributions to the news system, for possible addition to the news team.

Server Hardware

Our Servers run the latest stable version of Redhat Enterprise, or CentOS. We use Dell 19" rack Servers hosted on a multi-homed connection, all are Intel Pentium Xeon's with at least 4 GB of system memory per server. Our database is managed by MySQL (latest stable) and we currently run PHP 5 on our Apache servers.

In 2008 we purchased a 64-bit Intel Pentium Xeon Quad core Dell Server to manage our MySQL database, this came with 16GB of system memory.

In 2009 we purchased a further 64-bit Intel Pentium Xeon Quad core Dell Server with 24GB of system memory to run various virtual machines using VmWare ESXi. Servers 2 & 6 below run on this box. This server will allow us to start up additional virtual machines should a hardware failiure knock one of the others offline, giving us greater fault tolerance.

  • Server 1 (Built in 2008) - MySQL
  • Server 2 (VM) - Development Server
  • Server 3 (Built in 2005) - Apache (Web Server 1), IRC
  • Server 4 (Built in 2005) - Apache (Web Server 2)
  • Server 5 (Built in 2005) - Apache (Web Server 3)
  • Server 6 (VM) - MySQL